


Of Laurel and Bastion

by hesterbyrde



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), Planescape (Roleplaying Game), Ptolus: City by the Spire
Genre: Angst, Blood, Blood and Torture, F/M, Fallen Angels, Martyrdom, Self-Harm, Suicide, Time Travel, Torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-12
Updated: 2018-03-26
Packaged: 2019-03-30 06:44:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 34,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13945503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hesterbyrde/pseuds/hesterbyrde
Summary: Here he is, she thinks. Here he is at last. I found him. I made it. I remembered him and I found him just like I promised.Now what? Does she just start talking to him? Does she even know which "Bastion" she's managed to reach? For all she knows she might have managed to connect herself to Bastion of the here and now, trapped somewhere in the corrupted fortress above. Waiting for her… but then… when he had spoken in her head hadn't he said he'd been waiting for her? For how long?Well… she probably should have thought of all this before she decided to slit her throat. Too late for any of that now."Hi, Bastion."





	1. Prologue and Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Greetings all, and welcome to the indulgent novelization of an RP session with my DM, CactusOwl, and myself. 
> 
> We have been playing this campaign, which is an amalgamation of D&D 3.5, a few Pathfinder and house-rules, and Planescape, set in Monte Cook's Ptolus: City by the Spire, for nigh on to 13 years. And this is the pay-off for a side arc for my character, the half-elven bard Laurel, that spans about the entirety of our playtime. She is a storyteller and a collector of random bits of curious lost knowledge, and this has sprawled out into collecting pets, people, and occasionally deities. One of which is Ilmater, the god of martyrdom and sacrifice.
> 
> Early in the campaign, we encountered a reference to someone called "Bastion" who we learned to be planetar (a sort of four winged angel). He was a planar companion of a long dead fallen priest and Laurel made it her life's work to rescue him. So this is that story... and a few other stories to boot.
> 
> We play very fast and loose with all canons here... we mess with the origin of the drow, the nature of the Highest Heavens... even Bastion himself is actually supposed to be a boss fight in the original Ptolus module. And we even rope in a few non-RPG works, such as placing Valinor of Lord of the Rings fame on the plane of Arboria in the Planescape setting. So just... be aware.
> 
> Please also be aware that this story is very dark and deals with some disturbing themes. One thing that we wanted to explore was the idea of redemption and healing magic not always being made of fluff and starlight, but often being very very messy and ugly. As such, there is a lot of blood, torture, and angst to go around for both Laurel and Bastion, so if you're sensitive to subjects like suicide, self harm, torture, graphic depictions of injury and so forth, please proceed with caution. I've done my best to tag, but if I've missed something important, please let me know and I will fix it.
> 
> Many thanks to my fellow players Saffrontherogue, KaminaDuck, and LawlessDragon, and to our DM and my co-author CactusOwl. And also a special thanks to Monte Cook and company for their amazing original module. Sorry I turned your boss fight into my personal cinnamon roll sidequest.

Prologue

The prison world of Praemal is known in the Seven Heavens of Mount Celestia, as the Powers of Celestia are the ones who provided the means to seal it in the first place. The Highest Heaven is a place of blinding, burning light -- sunlight, in fact. The stars (on the Prime, and in Planes that have them) are manifestations of the substance of Celestia, and it was the Powers of Celestia who first gathered together the silver cords leading off of Praemal through the Astral Plane and onto the Outer Planes. They wound them into a strand and draped them over the core of its Sun. With the only routes off of it leading through the searing core of a star, Praemal became a nigh-impenetrable prison world.

But the Lords of the High Heavens -- the greatest of the archangels, and the demi-powers and Powers of the infinite crystal firmament that forms the uppermost reaches of Mount Celestia -- have the ability to penetrate the core of the Sun itself, given that their realm is the origin of starlight. And so, if they put forth their power, they can wreathe an angel in the hard flame of the Empyrean and send them to Praemal.

Mortals usually think of Celestia as a realm of expurgation, but in truth it is a realm of absolute order and justice. Pilgrims and petitioners ascend the slopes of Mount Celestia, and the combination of their toil and the blinding, pure light from above burns away their sins and their flaws, leaving only purity and perfection behind when they cross over into the Fourth Heaven and join the realm of the archons and angels, stretching up to the infinite reaches of the empyrean firmament of the Seventh and Highest Heaven.

But the process continues even beyond those realms that mortals tell of. Even the angels are not perfectly pure and spotless, as they must be to ascend ever upward. The perfection of the upper reaches of Celestia refines all who enter them into ever more pure forms -- burning away sin, polishing away roughness, and grinding away deviance and individuality until all is subsumed into the Will of the Lords of Heaven. Even the celestials are subject to this process. In its service, those with a penchant for individuality are sent away to be crusading angels in mortal realms, serving the Will of Heaven in the broader world.

One of these was Bastion -- a planetar with a desire for more active intervention to further the goals and ideals of Mount Celestia. His will to uphold those principles was strong, but -- in the process -- his desire to take concrete actions to further them was out of lockstep with the perfect stasis of the Empyrean Firmament in the Highest Heavens. So he was sent away by the Lords. They recognized his tenacity and determination to protect mortals from the depredations of chaos, and so they sent him to Praemal, through the heart of the Sun, on a one-way trip to monitor the world’s long lonely role as a prison-around-a-prison for Tharizdun. This would both further their will in the outside world, and -- conveniently -- send Bastion out to the oubliette of Praemal, his transgressive individual quest to destroy evil conveniently cast aside into a world from which no memories returned.

There, Bastion encountered Danar Rotansin in his citadel of Mosul Pearl. Danar was a great priest, righteous and forthright, and wielding divine might unparalleled on all of Praemal. Bastion learned of his crusade to cleanse Praemal from evil and was immediately drawn to his purity of purpose. He swore an oath to serve him as a planar ally, and was one of the chief agents who brought banes to him from around the world to be sealed in the Banewarrens. 

Bastion was, in fact, the one who found the Book of Inverted Darkness and brought it to Danar. This tome had passed from hand to bloody hand in the Eastern Continent, and contained arcane secrets from beyond Praemal -- clearly, it dated from the beginning of the world, before it was sealed away from the Planes. No record had been made of exactly what it contained, or how it gave power to those who read it. But without exception its owners quickly grew in magical prowess, in regal authority, and in the ruthless pursuit of power. And, yet, it was their downfall; even as their dominion grew, their will became subsumed with the chase for ever more profound rulership over those around them. Any who followed them out of friendship or love abandoned them; ultimately, their only servants became those bound to them by fear. And fear and tyranny provoke resistance; again and again those threatened by the upstart despot banded together and deposed him, overcoming the power and dark knowledge granted by the Book with numbers and valor. But each time the Book fell into the hands of one of the rebels, and the cycle began anew.

But this time would be different, as Danar’s forces themselves threw their weight behind the forces of good, led by Bastion. But his mission went beyond overthrowing the tyrant king and his newly-gained dark arts; Bastion was sent to recover the Book after their victory and bear it back to Mosul Pearl, where it would be sealed away forever. The Book’s power, however, burned him -- it scarred his hands and stained them black, and for weeks afterward black buboes appeared on his skin.

Danar began reading the Book, seeking to know the workings of this enemy before he sealed it away. But Danar’s single-minded obsession was his undoing. He turned everything he found toward the furtherance of his crusade. In this process he realized that Bastion was uniquely vulnerable to the dark energy from banes, owing to his celestial origins -- this afflicted him with something akin to the malaise induced by an allergy. So he tried to protect his loyal servant from this, and realized that adamantine plates enchanted to absorb evil would protect him -- as suggested to him by the Book. Bastion, made of far sterner stuff than mortals and used to the ascetic purification practices on Mount Celestia, consented to actually screwing the plates into his skeleton, as a way to anchor them -- anything to serve Danar, and Danar would do anything to protect his lieutenant on his crusade.

This process worked -- at least on the surface. But the Book managed to twist the purpose of his armor to actually absorb corruption and channel it into his skeleton. This was a small effect, but over time the accumulated corruption being channeled into his marrow took a toll on his body and mind. This was combined with the madness induced by seeing his master, who he absolutely idolized, fall slowly and inexorably into madness and evil. Danar, consumed by the ever-darkening scope of his quest, went from beneficent holy man to zealous crusader to twisted fiend. Meanwhile Bastion -- subtly twisted by the corruption leaching into his bones, and bound by his devoted loyalty to Danar himself -- was unable to do anything about it. 

And, so, Bastion fell along with him.

His identity, fragile even in his own element on Celestia, was shattered and broken. What was he, other than Danar’s servant? What purpose did he have, other than to follow his idol, to acquiesce to his will, to join with his crusade to purge or imprison all the ills of the world? He realized, of course, that Danar’s purpose was corrupted. Imprisoned in a cell of his own making, locked in a prison with no walls and no door, he had no way out -- at least, none that didn’t lead him down an unsteady path that he could not yet tread.

***

Chapter 1

Laurel was expecting the obsidian blade to hurt. Its glassy edge is jagged unlike the steel edge of her rapier, and the surface of the stone is pitted and uneven from the hammer strokes that shaped it. But the rippled blade bites cleanly into her flesh and she barely feels it part her skin as the magic she summons with her lifeblood surrounds her in a brilliant blue-white flash.

Everything outside her immediate surroundings slows to a crawl. The clamor of the battle fades to silence, save her own breathing. The air feels unnaturally still, even for such an interior place. She looks up and sees she and Bastion are the only things that now move. She hasn't even begun to bleed yet. And furthermore, he hasn't noticed her.

Here he is, she thinks. Here he is at last. I found him. I made it. I remembered him and I found him just like I promised.

Now what? Does she just start talking to him? Does she even know which "Bastion" she's managed to reach? For all she knows she might have managed to connect herself to Bastion of the here and now, trapped somewhere in the corrupted fortress above. Waiting for her… but then… when he had spoken in her head hadn't he said he'd been waiting for her? For how long?

Well… she probably should have thought of all this before she decided to slit her throat. Too late for any of that now.

"Hi, Bastion." 

Laurel’s timid voice echoes in the eerie quiet of the spell. She clearly hadn't thought about what she was going to say either, as she sounded bafflingly stupid and dim. At least she thought ahead enough to be speaking Celestial. That makes it more refined, right?

She can sense Bastion's frown even before he pushes his hood off his bald head, fiery eyes scanning the room for the source of the voice. When he speaks, his voice booms out in Abyssal-accented Celestial. “I haven’t been called by that name in years. Who are you?”

Laurel laughs in spite of herself and just barely resists turning in a little circle on dancing feet. It worked! It worked! She might have killed herself to do it but it worked! Now all she has to do is just tell him what's going on and that will mean he comes to save Fall-From-Grace and everyone down at the Temple of Jode!

"Down here!" She calls waving a hand. "I'm… I'm Laurel. You don't know me. But I've read about you. You're one of Danar's companions. What do they call you if not Bastion?"

His frown deepens as he finds the tiny half-elf standing below him at his elbow. She wasn't there a moment ago, and certainly does not look fit to be in the battle he is currently fighting. And as he squints at her, he notices her clothes are downright strange. “I am called the Maleficite." He answers. "The Alloy of Evil.”

She pulls a face at the sound of his assumed name, like she just swallowed a salted lemon. "Well, that's a mouthful of razorvines. I like Bastion better. That's how I know your story anyway. It's who you still are to me."

“Then you know me from before my fall from grace?” he says, keen eyes scanning the battlefield for any others like her, but she seems to be alone. And yet… and yet out of the corner of his eye, he can see shadows moving. Things that shouldn't be there. Things that weren't there before.

"I know -of- you, let’s say." Laurel goes on, rocking back on her heels and looking quite pleased with herself. "Your story is one of the many I've been curious about in my life. I heard about you… found your name written as one of Danar's compatriots, but never heard what became of you until now."

Bastion turns stiffly and looks down at Laurel, his attention now fully diverted from the battle around him by this peculiar newcomer. "Who -are- you? Are you an observer of the War from the Outside?"

She shakes her head, sending her thickly-cabled braid swishing like a horse's tail. "No. I'm from Ptolus. Back when it still had a sun. I… wait… wait you… do you know about that yet?"

Bastion frowns again. It seems to be, if the deep-set lines of his green-tinted lavender face are any indication, an expression he's used to wearing. “Yet? What do you mean?”

"Right." Laurel sighs, her mouth working as she searches for words. She really should have planned ahead. But she hadn't even remembered him until just… she stops herself and shakes her head. Not the time for guilt. Not now. She doesn't know how long she has to pull this off. She takes a deep breath and tries to explain. "This… is going to sound a little insane. I'm… I'm appearing to you from the future. See that man? Rassilon?" She points to where an old wizard stands crouched over a magic circle, frozen mid-motion.

“Yes -- the old mage casting his ritual, protected by his allies…”

Laurel turns back to him. "They're going to lose. You know that, right? They certainly do. They know that they don't have enough firepower to counter you. They're going to lose badly."

“I am compelled to do my best to ensure that they do." Bastion replies somewhat mechanically, squaring his shoulders, his enormous flaming sword hanging loosely from one hand, all but forgotten. "And I have never lost a battle except to myself." He pauses, his frown deepening as he regards Laurel closely. "Why am I telling this to you?”

Still being incredibly pleased with herself, Laurel can't help but grin. Maybe this is progress. "Because you're curious what will happen? I can't hurt you. And you can't hurt me. I've come through this room before and ate one of your meteor swarms to the face. I think I lost an eyebrow." She scrubs a finger over her right eye.

Bastion is unmoved by her attempts at humor. He appears lost… no, distressed at his thoughts. As if he hadn't heard a word she'd just said. His eyes stare out at someplace far beyond the confines of this room. Something is coming back to him but he cannot seem to let himself believe it. “No… No, your accent reminds me of hers, I think...”

Laurel's smile melts slightly and she takes a step towards him. "Reminds you of who, love?" The pet name slips out along with a more soothing tone. She can't help it.

He shakes his head as if to rattle something loose. “Reminds me of the last one who reminded me what love is.”

She pulls up short at that. "And do you remember?" The question is out of her mouth before she can stop it.

Bastion looks doubly pained and triply confused, shaking his head slightly, then sighs as if he’s made up his mind about something. “I am not whole, not any more. Part of me has that memory, but … memories do not make substance, and the substance of charity is not part of who I am, not now." He takes a deep breath, his jaw tensing as he squares his shoulders again. "I devoted myself to Danar and joined myself to his crusade, in spirit and in body. And where it has gone -- so I have gone.” 

Laurel's stomach plummets into her boots. For a moment. For a split second she had thought this might be easy. Hoped, perhaps, would be the better word. Maybe she could make him laugh. Spin him a yarn about Danar's sun-putting-out machine. He could even possibly have some divine, angelic way to undo her mortal wound, and then they could skip off together to go save everyone at the Temple. But this… this would be a project. And she still has no clue how long she has...

She takes a deep breath and lets herself look. Really look at him. His armor. His cowl. His sword wreathed in fire that is anything but holy. And the lines of his face… careworn and exhausted. "Oh Bastion." she sighs, finally. "I always wondered what became of you after the histories stopped talking about you."

He doesn't look at her, instead staring out over the frozen carnage around him. “This war, I fear, will be the end of history, with or without me.” 

Laurel lets her head weave side to side consideringly. "You're not wrong, oddly enough. And yet… and yet you are. Rassilon and his band fail to stop Danar, but they plant the seed of this world's redemption with that ritual. Do you know what it is?"

Bastion shakes his head. “No, I don’t; what is it?”

She looks back off over her shoulder again. "The spell he's casting? It's a time sink. Or at least… that's what we call it. He's making it so there's a sort of… time lapse here in this room and surrounding the Spire. And anyone who walks into the room and states the password can activate the spell, see the battle again, and change what has happened. And someone does… someone comes to buy Rassilon enough time to weaken Danar and then break his staff… the Staff of Shards and destroy Danar. It's… a second chance. For someone else to come and save the day."

The image of Bastion wavers before Laurel. Or more accurately, the room wavers around them. Fog rolls briefly across her vision, such that for a moment Laurel thinks she might have passed out... or that the spell faded and she's out of time.

But when her sight coalesces again, she finds both herself and Bastion standing in a corridor outside a room with a door made out of once-gleaming white marble. The marble has been stained in a few places as if by soot, and the veins in the stone writhe slowly in the dim light. Bastion's hulking frame is leaning against the stone door's frame and he peers through a small window with dead, hooded eyes. And one would be forgiven for thinking him a statue. Laurel can barely even see him breathe he's standing so still. Only the occasional slow blink of his golden eyes hints that he's not made of stone entirely.

They aren't in the battle anymore, she realizes. She can't hear any sounds of combat so it must be over. And Rassilon's still lost. But the angel is here, and that's not nothing. The spell is still working; she still has a chance.

Laurel takes this moment to really look at Bastion again, for longer this time while he's preoccupied with whatever is beyond that door. He's a giant… over seven feet tall and broadly set across the shoulders. She only comes up to the bottom of his plated collarbone, which makes holding a conversation somewhat difficult. Or it would if she was capable of feeling her body at all. She can't feel anything, now that she thinks about it. Not even the wound on her neck. Everything feels like the Hand of Fiona did, once it fused itself to her stump. A delicate, tingling numbness that's only really noticeable when she lets herself be aware of it.

But Bastion is clearly uncomfortable, to put it very lightly. At first Laurel thought he was wearing armor, but as she looks more closely now, she realizes that the armor is actually bolted to him. Broad hinged adamantine plates are drilled into his flesh with black-tinged pus dripping like sap from the edges and joints. His four wings are a mangled ruin of broken feathers and jagged plates. He winces every time he moves. Not obviously, but Laurel can see a faint tightness swell and ebb in the creases in his face. And now she understands why he is often so preternaturally still.

Just like he is now as he looks through that window in the door. Awaiting something, perhaps? Or watching something. His visage is grim… like he's in a hospital or asylum. Perhaps the latter is most accurate.

"Bastion… what happened to you?" Laurel hears herself say before she can think better of it. "Did Danar do this to you?"

He blinks twice, turning to see her with no small amount of surprise on his face before he schools it. “Yes and no." he answers, his voice flat and devoid of emotion. Laurel has to fight not to roll her eyes. Celestials. All these planar beings really. She swears they'll be the death of her with their vague half-answers. The succubus back in Sigil that she screwed around with for information was not nearly so evasive, though perhaps the lifeforce she'd put on the line sweetened the deal. 

"I pledged my loyalty, body and spirit, to him and his quest." Bastion went on, turning his gaze back to the window. The tone of the statement struck Laurel's ears as if he were a priest mechanically reciting scripture. "But the armor I wear now is one of the many things eating at me; it is a symbol of what I am, but it is anathema to what I was.”

Laurel isn't terribly satisfied with this answer, but it will do for now. Probably best not to pick at those stitches, she thinks. At least not just yet. "I always wondered, Bastion," she says, a little dreamily, as she turns in place in the hallway. 

“What did you wonder, Laurel?” He sounds more than a little amused. Perhaps even irritated. But all the same, he lingers on her name for a moment, as if to taste it before speaking it. 

Progress, thought Laurel. Though towards what she couldn't be sure just yet.

Laurel takes a step closer to him, peering up at him with bright, sad eyes. "What happened to you?", she asks earnestly, unable to keep away from the question that had plagued her for years. "I told myself all kind of stories. And… I told myself that I would find you one day. I knew what happened to Danar. And to Parnaith… But I didn't know what happened to you."

Bastion recoils at the sound of her name as if Laurel has struck him across the face. His tissue-thin good humor falls swiftly in behind the guard that springs up clearly in his eyes. “You seem to have found me on several days." he evades, his voice going hard. The Abyssal accent stands out like thorns on his words. "But I do not know if for me you mean “what happened”, which I can tell you, or “what will happen”, which you know more than I." He doesn't even deign to glance at her as he speaks.

Laurel hangs her head. She's being too forward. This really is not going to be as easy as she thought. She had wanted it to be easy. Or at least… difficult in a different way. She'd seen herself the glowing, brash, swashbuckling hero, swinging in with her rapier between her teeth whooping and saving him from whatever horror had been set upon him. She'd imagined him a princess in a tower, and she nearly laughs bitterly as she remembers this. This… this was not what she had expected at all.

Bastion sees the dejection saturate her frame out of the corner of his eye and sighs, wincing slightly as he does. He doesn't look at her. His attention is still focused through the window as he speaks, but his voice loses some of its sharpness. "As I said, I pledged myself to Danar and his quest, joining my power and aims to his. I admired his utter devotion to his crusade -- his purity of purpose, it seemed at the time -- but what gave him his outward triumph was also his inner downfall. I brought him an artifact -- the Book of Inverted Darkness, which Danar himself reads even more obsessively now after the Battle. It stained me and burned me, being something of utmost evil, and for weeks after it I bore the pox of an Oinonian plague. But I brought it to him, following his plan to accumulate and seal up all of the sources of ill in the world.

"And, to know his enemy, he read it before throwing it in the vaults. Just a page or two. Not to gain its power for himself, but just to learn how it worked its malice on those who owned it. But the Book’s power ensnared him, and he read more -- lacking the perspective, in his single-minded devotion to his quest to recognize it for what it was. There were once stones on another world, enchanted to give their bearer great insight into distant places and events, but twisted to provide that information in a way that served their master. The Book is like this, but a thousandfold worse, and I am convinced there is some kind of living cunning lurking beneath its pages.

"And so his devotion to his crusade grew ever more intense, defining “evil” in terms broader and broader, and striking it down with less and less mercy -- until, at some point, simply to stand in his way was an act of the deepest sin. And I, bound to him, was forced to choose. I am a creature of Heaven, and it is not in my bones to slaughter an innocent. But my oath of loyalty to him bound me. 

So I changed. Danar granted me this armor that I wear, made of adamantine plates screwed into my skeleton, to guard me against the ills I would encounter that were anathema to me. But it absorbed them, and has changed me into the very thing that it protects me from. But it’s more than that. I pledged myself to him, and as he has changed so have I. I don’t like it… I didn't mean for this to happen. But it is who I am now -- or, at least, part of what part of me is."

Laurel’s glance falls again on his armor, imagining the torment he must be enduring with such massive plates screwed into his bones, even if what lay beneath the surface of his angelic flesh was far sterner than her own. He wears a jagged, angular vambrace an inch thick on his right arm, wrapping most of the way around his forearm. Looking more closely, Laurel notes that something like moss appears to grow from his armor, or the fragile threads of mold -- purplish hairs a half-inch long, waving and rippling as if in an unseen breeze. Ominous -- as though the spores of some fiendish fungus have settled on him and taken root.

Laurel heaves a heavy sigh, taking another step forward. "Bastion…" 

His name is barely more than a whisper. She reaches out to touch his vambrace, checking his face carefully to make sure he's alright with being touched this way. She realizes midgesture that she's not using her own hand, but the hand of Fiona that's been grafted to the bereft stump of her left arm. She smiles to herself in an expression that's more grimace than grin. So appropriate…

The surface of the dark metal is smooth and warm, save in a few lines that she traces with the pads of her fingers. She looks more closely and realizes there are letters carved hastily into the bracer. Abyssal letters by the look of it… but...

She almost recoils as a gout of smoke issues from under her fingertips along with a loud hissing sound. The purplish stain recedes just a fraction under her touch; the waving hairs shrink away from her fingers, as though beaten down by a breath of air, and she can read her name plain as the day she hopes to see again.

Laurel.

"Does… this doesn't hurt, does it?" She asks timidly, lifting her hand to hover an inch or so above the smoking metal. "I mean. I don't need to ask if the armor itself hurts."

He shakes his head, watching with passionless interest. “No … that is good for me, I think." He frowns, though the faintest ghost of a smile touches his lips as he regards her. "Who are you, Laurel?”

She lifts one shoulder in a small shrug as she continues to chase the corruption from the metal on his massive vambrace in slow sweeping passes of her hands. "I'm… I'm a storyteller." She answers simply. "I'm a collector of stories and lost things. Nothing more." 

And then a thought dawns on her like a bolt of lightning, and her hand stills for a moment. Maybe… Maybe… it's worked before... 

"Would you like to hear a story?" she asks, cocking her head to look up at him, her green eyes shining in the dim light.

He blinks once, slowly. All else about his frame is completely still. “Yes, I would." He answers after a moment's curious consideration. "I fear that I am in my own that does not end well, watching my master read his own undoing as the threads of his mind come apart, and my identity with them.”

She straightens a little then as she takes a deep breath. "Then, I'll tell you a story. And maybe you can help me figure out who I am. Maybe there's a better answer than just a storyteller." She notices that he's not looking at her anymore but has begun staring through the window again. "Stop watching Danar and listen to me, Bastion." she says, a little more snippily than she means to, but it gets his attention nonetheless. "Because I know an ending or three that you don't. Including… funnily enough, your own.

His eyes snap to her face with a tight sort of surprise. “Go on, Laurel.” he replies. Despite his shock at her sharpness, he clearly savors her name again as he says it.

"I need to tell you something first though." she says, looking around at the walls. The weird pulsing purple corruption radiating out from the door is the same as on his armor, she realizes. This could be a problem. Perhaps THE problem.

“Yes?”

"This corruption is going to spread." she says matter of factly. "I've seen that it does. And your armor will probably get worse before it gets better. But I think there is a way to protect yourself."

His posture visibly stiffens. “I am not sure that is something I am capable of -- my will is no longer entirely my own, although for whatever reason the part of me speaking to whoever you are, spirit, is more of who I once was than who I am now. But I would like to know, even if I can’t do it.”

Laurel sighs patiently. This is not going to be as easy as she had hoped, she tells herself again. But that doesn't mean it's impossible. Or not worth at least trying. He's listening to her. He wants her to tell him a story. It's a starting place. She just hopes she has enough time.

"Then remember this so you can use it when you need it." she says. "There is a sanctuary in this place. You know where I'm talking about. You've seen it with your waking eyes. I've only dreamed about it. But as sure as I've always been that you're alive up in Jabel Shammar, I am certain that this place exists. Parnaith's room."

His lips thin at the sound of her name but he doesn't react as strongly as before. “I know the place. I once delighted in it, sitting by Parnaith’s hearth as she told tales of the world between the planes she dreamed of creating, or of the snow in the mountains she loved. Her soul reminds me of the Upper Planes… where I came from. I have not been back to her room since she fled from Jabel Shammar, nor has Danar. You say it is a sanctuary? From what, exactly?”

"From the Book's corruption. It's going to spread, especially once the sun is gone." Bastion looks at her in what could only be surprise, taken aback by the matter-of-fact way Laurel describes what she knows to be his future. "Danar is going to kill the sun. You know he's already working on it. The Book is probably going to give him the idea, I'm sure, if it hasn't already." 

Bastion blinks at this. "I know he is working on a key to open Praemal so he could extend his crusade to the Planes." His brows arch considerably as he takes this in. "That’s what he’s intending?" 

Laurel is visibly relieved that she doesn't have to convince him of this fact any further. How would she even go about that? She had no evidence. She had no evidence of anything, come to think of it, other than her unexpected presence in Jabel Shammar. She brushes the doubt from her mind. One thing at a time. "That would be the plan." she affirms with a nod. "And he succeeds… spoiler alert. But then Rassilon's time sink undoes it… and then someone re-does it… and… I suppose I should actually tell you the story, shouldn't I?

For the briefest second, Bastion's lips quirk in something like a smile. But it's gone before Laurel can even really see it. “Yes, you should.” he answers.

She cocks her head and steps closer. "First tell me something, Bastion?"

“Yes, Laurel?”

"Why is my name written on your armor?"

He looks down at his bracer and then immediately looks away. “I was visited by your spirit during the Battle, and recognized in you something that reminded me of my former self. Afterward I wrote down your name on what I had at hand…”

Laurel frowns slightly at that. "So… how long has it been since the battle?"

“Two days…" His eyes go distant and bleak as he turns his gaze back towards the window, and Danar beyond. "Two long, horrifying days.”

Something inside her clenches. That old desire to soothe and make better bubbles to the surface like a hot spring. But there's nothing to be done. Not really. Still she offers. She can't not. Withholding comfort is not in her nature. Not anymore. "Do you want to tell me about what's happened? Or should I tell you a story?"

He gives one last baleful glance through the window before focusing on Laurel fully. “I think I’d rather hear your story. It might help, whatever that means for me…” 

She takes a deep breath as Bastion fixes her with his otherworldly gaze. She recalls going to a museum in Ptolus when she was younger, and seeing an insect collection. All these tiny fragile things pinned to the walls and kept under glass, unable to escape. That's how she feels right now.

This is it, she realizes. She's told a lot of stories in her day, but this is the big one. She gave her life to tell a story to a trapped angel. This is it. The fate of her friends hangs on her ability to tell a good story. To an audience of one. The best audiences always were, in her opinion. And so she takes a deep breath, grounding herself before she begins. 

"How do all the good stories start?" she mused dramatically. "Once upon a time? I guess that doesn't work here… because it's once upon a bunch of time. But once upon a time, my traveling companions and I were adventuring and living dangerously in and around the Banewarrens. There were quite a few that came in and out of our company, but the only one who stayed… who always stayed, was Cayn, the paladin of Corellon.

"We were and odd pair, he and I. He the stiff, stalwart knight-type with his shiny sword, and valiant steed, and strict codes. And me… with my… well… with myself. I'm shocked he still sticks around, as much trouble as I cause him. But he stays. Mostly to keep me out of trouble, since I seem to find a considerable amount.

"We were made aware by some of the city officials that someone had begun unsealing the vaults, looking for the Black Grail. Do you know it?"

Bastion frowns in thought, folding his arms across his chest as he leans against the wall. His jaw tightens minutely as he does so. "Yes… I seem to recall that one. A chalice of obsidian. Confines the victim’s soul, replaces it with something in thrall to the Grail’s master?”

Laurel nods enthusiastically. "That's the one. Nasty piece of work. Nasty. And someone did find it. A member of the noble House Vladaam. The eldest son used it to enslave a dozen or so officials and his own sister, Navanna, and effectively ruled the city for awhile. It's been… done away with. The Grail has. So don't worry. But… I'll get to that story later."

Bastion cocks his head. “When is this? Clearly you are from the future, but what is your time?”

It's Laurel's turn to frown as she casts her mind back through what she knows of the local history. "Lets see… the current date was 1567, as our calendar counts forward from the eruption of Mt. Stalagos and the fall of the Temple of All-Consumption. So counting backwards to the reign of Danar..." She theatrically fingerpaints a timeline for herself in the air. "That makes me… about ten thousand years in the future. From you right now. With the sun currently off. But we're trying to turn it back on again like it was before. For us, I mean."

Bastion nods implacably. “I see. Go on.”

Laurel blinks slowly at his response and then bemusedly shakes her head. "You must have seen some weird stuff in your long life if you react to a storytelling half-elf from ten thousand years in the future with "I see.""

She had expected him to laugh, at least a little. It was absurd. One of the more absurd things she'd ever said in her life. But he doesn't laugh. He just leans against the wall enshrouded in that forced stillness he wears like funeral clothes. Laurel waits… hoping he might at least crack a grin, but when he doesn't respond, she continues telling her tale.

"At any rate… one of the things we discovered while bumbling around in the Banewarrens was the time sink Rassilon made. At first we didn't know what we'd found. Some weird illusion spell or ghosts or… well, we eventually figured out that it was time magic. Rassilon and his army look like they are about to lose and lose badly, but not before dropping the time sink spell -- a spell which, to our eyes, did absolutely nothing! The old mage finished his ritual, nodded, and then rejoined the hopeless battle. But -- then! -- an army… no, a choir of dark elves appear to bolster their forces!”

Laurel’s green eyes glitter, as her well-honed stage instincts take over. “And then Rassilon and his army win! The choir keeps them standing long enough for Rassilon to break the Staff of Shards, killing Danar, and the sun turns back on. Rassilon’s spell brought them to him from two thousand years in his and your future, and eight thousand in my past. See? Everything happens all at once. Your battle. The drow. Us. Us again, from a year in my past. And people from your future keep interfering and changing who wins."

Laurel realizes Bastion is listening so intently he hasn't so much as glanced through the window at his master. His despair at his master's state seems at least momentarily to be forgotten. She decides she'll take it, and presses on.

"See… the elves were from the timeline with no sun. But they had magic… special magic. It was musical magic. The same magic I used to contact you… only I'm supposed to use a whole choir to fuel a spell like that. Not just me. We thought for awhile that Parnaith gave it to them, but it turns out it was their flesh-and-blood leader in the Underdark. A drow named Esperiel."

Bastion draws up slightly at this, his gaze sharpening. “Parnaith is still alive in your time, then? She survives the cataclysm?”

Laurel presses her lips together into a thin line as she decides how to broach the sensitive subject. "She… transcends it, I think would be the way to say it."

“I imagine I will see what you mean." Bastion replies, his enthusiasm clearly undeterred by the evasiveness of her answer. "But Parnaith -- survives! She is alive even now! That gives me a small amount of hope for the redemption of this world. Danar may have been the crusader bearing the flag of justice and good, but Parnaith is the soul behind it all. She left, utterly abject at what she saw Danar become, a few months ago, and none have seen her since.”

Laurel blinks at this. He's so effusively happy for the first time that she's seen. He smiled. Actually smiled when he learned the fate of Parnaith… or at least in part. He has missed her, Laurel realizes. And terribly. 

"She watched the battle… if you want to know." she tells him, her voice careful and reserved. "I had… a dream about her, I guess you'd say. A very long time ago. Well… it seems a long time ago. Before I knew anything about how big this was… or what was to come for me."

“She watched it?" Bastion asks. "She is a druid of phenomenal power -- she didn’t participate at all, then?”

Laurel shook her head. "No… she was long gone, far to the icy wastes. She watched the battle by scrying in an ice sheet. She wept… I thought at the time it was just for her husband but…" Laurel frowns up at Bastion with a slow dawning realization. "Now I'm not so sure it was just him."

“Oh?” Bastion cocks his head.

"She left behind more than just a husband when she fled. When she gave up hope in truth? She left behind her home… the fate of all of us at least for a time." Laurel pauses to weigh her words carefully. "And clearly she left behind you. Did you not want to go with her?"

The angel's shoulders sag slightly. “I did, perhaps. But I gave my loyalty to Danar, and that commitment bound me. And besides it has been too late -- me as I am? I have nowhere to go. I am not the Bastion who she inspired with tales of the space between planes years ago.”

All the air in Laurel's lungs rushes out at this admission. "Can I tell you something, Bastion? Something it's taken me awhile to learn?"

“Of course.”

"If you can ask the question ‘Is it too late?’ the answer is, ‘It's not.’" She reaches out again to trace her name where it's etched into his armor; drawn to it as a distraction from the weight of the moment. A sliver of silence slips by, and she sees Bastion's eyes start to flicker towards the window again, but he hasn't let himself look through. 

"I remember the first time I ever saw your name written down." Laurel rushes the words out in an effort to seize his attention, nearly garbling them before she takes a breath to continue. "I found your name in a dusty old ledger -- ‘Bastion, the four-winged angel of the morning.’ And one of Danar's old constructs told me who you were… that no one had seen you in thousands of years. But I knew you were still alive. And that it wasn't too late. Stories didn't start with angels trapped in towers and end with nothing but a vague mystery. Or worse yet, a tragedy. No, I knew I would come to you and find a way to get you out of here. But… this…" She turns in place taking in the corrupted walls that frame Bastion in this moment. "This is not what I imagined…" she pauses to shake her head. "Me and my silly imagination. I'm always far too obvious and sentimental. But… At the same time, I guess I wasn't wrong." She grips the plate on his forearm hard before letting her hand fall to her side again.

Bastion's mouth curves into a sad smile. “Sentimentality … that is something we don’t have much of here, nor much of on Mount Celestia. But I have always been struck by its surprising power, at the end of it all." His brow wrinkles in thought. "But I still live ten thousand years from now? I had expected -- and, perhaps hoped -- that the Battle would be the end of me, the end of my suffering. And now I expect I will not last long in whatever perverse thing this world becomes. But I survive then?”

"You do." she confirms with a nod. "I know you do because you come to our rescue ten thousand years from now. You come to our aid in a hail of fire and wrath that we were endlessly grateful for. It's… it's how I knew I had to contact you, actually."

Bastion turns his head in confusion. “I … come to your aid?”

"You do." Laurel nods again, even more emphatically. "Or at least I hope you will. See… when we arrive to turn the sun back on a second time we are met with some new… guests in Ptolus. Frost giant worshippers of Cryonax… followers of the Elder Elemental Eye. Tharizdun. Are you familiar with Tharizdun?"

Bastion's steely eyes widen by a fraction. “The thing imprisoned under this planet? The chief of the Banes that Danar dreamed of imprisoning?”

"Yeah, that's probably him. Don't worry… he's still in his box with a solar sitting on it." Laurel vaguely waves her hand dismissively. "But that never seems to stop his cultists from causing problems… chiefly that they've summoned Cryonax in a place where he'll be present in all the timelines. So if we don't sort him out before we flip the sun back on, we'll be basically teleporting a giant frothing ice elemental into the middle of a major city. And never mind all the mystical stuff regarding the princes and the freeing of Tharizdun and blah blah blah. So our allies are down there fighting for all they're worth. It's… it's a close thing, I'm given to understand.

"But you show up! In the battle out in the city. I heard from my allies and… and then-" She almost tells him that she had heard his voice too, booming in her head, telling her that he had waited for her, but she diverts at the last second. Definitely too much information. "I figured the only way that could be the case was that I spoke to you. So… here I am. Though… Honestly? Between you and me. This spell would have gotten cast with or without doomsday ice dude coming out to play." She winks at him hoping to garner a smile.

He doesn't smile. His confused frown actually deepens as he regards her. “Why? Why reach into the past to talk to a fallen angel?”

Laurel thinks about this question for a very long time. And for the first time actually. "Because I wanted to know what happened to you. I was curious. It's pretty much that simple. Or it was at the start anyway. I always wanted to know what happened to you. From the very first time I saw your name in a crumbling ledger. But…" Here she pauses and sighs as she searches for words she's not sure she has. "A lot has happened to me since then. I'm not… I'm not the person who saw your name and went, "Let's go find the fallen angel! I'm curious what happened to him!" But I do think… I think that was the beginning of something very big. For me at least. I still have that impulse… to find and save things that are lost or forgotten. But… it's become more somehow." She shakes her head as the words to explain herself run out like sand in an hourglass. She sighs and then looks up at him with renewed purpose. "Would you like to hear another story? I'm good at stories. Not so much with anything else."

Before Bastion can reply, Laurel's vision fades again, fogging at the edges before obscuring entirely. She feels disoriented… adrift… and as if something is watching her out in the mist. But the impression is fleeting as her vision clears and she finds both herself and Bastion standing on one of the lower parapets of Jabel Shammar. The landscape is cast in a dull, barely luminescent red. Low on the far horizon a ruddy ember rises above the lip of the horizon. Like a blood moon… but it's early morning by reckoning of the stars, and they are facing east. 

Sunrise. 

Or what passes for it now. The sun's light is trailing away in ragged, sanguine wisps as the remnants of the corona slowly cool and fade into darkness.

Laurel lets out a slow, audible sigh to alert Bastion to her presence. "It's happening, isn't it?" she says softly. "Or has it already happened and we're just watching the aftermath?"

Bastion doesn't look down at her as she comes to stand next to him. He stands with his preternatural stillness cloaking him like a second skin. “I suppose so. I knew he was trying to do this. I never thought he’d be mad enough to succeed. I… I didn't want to believe you. He can’t live in a dead world, not forever.”

Laurel studies the tops of her boots very carefully. "No... you won't be able to save him from what comes next. No one will." 

Bastion appears unmoved, his eyes fixed steadily on the mortally wounded sun. “I know. I realized he was across a divide no power here could bridge a few days after the Battle, when he became even more obsessed with his own standing and self, and with the Book. He went on a rampage and tried to annihilate all remnants of his old life from the castle.”

Laurel puts her left hand on his adamantine epaulet and gently turns him to face her. "You don't have to watch, Bastion. It isn't required of you. Turn and look at me. I think I promised you a story?"

His body turns but his head does not. “It is required of me, in a way. I suppose I am one of the Fallen Angels now, or at least like them -- and the first of them who now are venerated on Elysium were called the Watchers. They fell and rose again -- but I am just Fallen. Either way, this world is now what it is and if your story is true, I’ll have plenty of time to take it in." He pauses, licking his lips. "But you are a fleeting ghost, and more substantial than this dying world.” He finally tears his eyes from the sun and turns to look at her. "What is your tale?"

Laurel feels equally pinned by both his words and the aching sadness in his gaze. "I suppose I am fleeting. A small and passing thing always. Remind me to tell you sometime the tale of a fiend who fell. You sound a lot like her. Apparently "down" is the same direction for everyone, no matter where you're falling from.

"But my tale… My tale is actually the story of a Ilmaterian priestess named Fiona."

Laurel takes a moment to gather herself, staring off at the dying sun as it rises in the sky. It does not brighten as it gains height over the horizon. It's still just a dull, bloody shard floating in the blackness of the sky; for a moment Laurel gets the sense she is looking at some mortally-wounded soldier with a severed artery, as though the glowing embers trailing off the Sun are like its lifeblood, gushing out into the void as vitality leaves it never to return. She can feel Bastion's eyes on her as he patiently waits for her to begin. He doesn't seem as easily distracted as he was before. The thought makes her smile and ache all at once though she can't understand why.

"Fiona of the Ilmaterian faith was younger than me I think… though I never got to know her very well. I'll regret that fact to my grave. Which… admittedly shouldn't be much longer?" She scratches absently at cut on her neck, which still has not yet begun to bleed in truth. "But the sentiment still stands. She was someone that I could not save."

Bastion frowns slightly. “I won’t even try to figure out what “much longer” means in this strange timestream. Yet you are strange -- a bearer of tales, wielding no power from the Upper Planes, seeking the salvation of an Ilmaterian?”

"It's not so much her salvation that I seek now. Not in the classical sense. More… her remembrance." Laurel corrected gently. "She was a powerful healer. And though many of her brethren stayed behind in the name of their vows of pacifism, she marched on the Vladaam estate with us when we went to retrieve the Black Grail. She saved many lives before finally giving up her own, when a battalion of archers took aim on her with explosive arrows. 

"Everything was incinerated. Her clothes. Her body. Even her holy symbol. All that remained of her was her left hand. I took it with me into the estate, thinking that I would return it to her temple after the fight was won. She was owed the gratitude of a burial, even if I couldn't be bothered to know how old she was when she had marched into battle with me. Little did I know that Aliaster Vladaam was waiting with a spell that would leave me bereft of my own left hand. At the time I wasn't really one to see signs or such things in coincidences.... But even I couldn't deny this one. And so it became all the more important that I keep Fiona's hand with me until I could return it to her people. The loss of my own hand was punishment I thought. For wasting one as precious as her on something as silly and shortsighted as a political struggle. I was just some upstart storyteller. But Fiona… she was heroically kind and generous in a way that I will never be." 

“The Lower Planes are full of forges and laboratories making things of malice and hatred." Bastion opined. "But it’s things like that this that make all the artifacts of the Upper Planes, the ones with actual power.”

Laurel nodded. "Indeed… I still have it with me actually. It never got buried." She raises left hand and wiggles fingers, letting the dull light catch on the pearlescent white of her -- Fiona’s? -- skin. Even in the light of the dying sun, it had a lovely almost-hallowed sheen. "It fused to my arm when… Well, I'm getting ahead of myself.

"We were ultimately victorious. Aliaster was slain. Those grailed fell unconscious, and we marched back to the city… only to find that there was an even greater threat headed our way. Aliaster had meant to destabilize the city so that his father, Iristul, could sack the city with a huge army of trolls. And so I went from storyteller to charismatic leader to general in a matter of a few days. Then… after that fight was won… the sun went out.

"Again, as some of us knew.

"And we all had to flee to the Planes before we were subsumed by the shift into the version of our timeline with no sun. And flee I did, with with some six thousand people to Oinos, which was the first portal off world that we could find. Soldiers. Clerics. City officials. A few tradesmen. And Fiona's hand still in my pocket. Still pink and faintly warm as if it had just been severed. As my colleagues and I led the Ptolian fleet of refugees across the Grey Wastes, I discovered that Fiona's hand was granting my healing spells more power. And perhaps was guiding me closer to my destiny. I was undoubtedly beginning to feel the pull of something… in that place where stories and ideas hold so much sway."

Bastion's mouth pulls in a tight mimicry of a smile. “Ilmater’s greatest gift is tenacity, I’ve found -- his followers’ deeds and aims seem to survive far longer than anyone expects, and have most power in situations of despair and deprivation. I’m sure it was the Grey Wastes itself that had something to do with the power of this hand -- Fiona’s will, reacting from beyond the grave, to the plight of the few natives left of her home plane.”

Laurel nods consideringly. "Funnily enough… her hand was my portal key to get out of the Wastes. The exit portal key is a token of final desperate hope. My guilt that she couldn't be saved was what got me out of there with ease. 

"I suppose one could argue Fiona's story ends where I began the tale. But I think she's still with us. With me. Her sacrifice… her willingness to stare down her own mortality granted us all a boon greater than we ever imagined.

"I marveled at it at the time. I'd never actually seen a martyr before. Only heard about them in stories. I thought the whole idea preposterous back then. Why die when you could live and keep doing something about the injustices in the world? What could one life possibly buy that's so important it couldn't be purchased any other way? There's a lot of currencies in the multiverse… why was blood so damned important?" She huffs out a heavy sigh. "I guess I have my answer now, don't I?"

Bastion lifts one shoulder in a shrug, the ruins of his wings flexing slightly in their metal bonds. “Blood can buy others a chance to live. There’s no greater virtue among the martial angels than the willingness to take a stand -- on a hill, by a tree, in a river -- and say ‘The only road past here runs through me!’ Win that battle against all odds and you are a hero; lose it and you are an even greater hero. I was willing to do that for Danar. But I was wrong -- even though I still stand on that tower. It sounds like you bear more than a part of Fiona with you still, more than just her hand. You are more than a mere collector of tales, aren’t you?”

Laurel takes a slow deep breath as she ponders an honest and all-encompassing answer to his question. "Once the stories were just stories. Bits of frivolity I could exchange for a bed or a meal or a studiously blind eye. But now? Now, I'm not so sure. I've bought things with stories that shouldn't have prices. And they've given me more stories in turn."

Bastion considers her reply for a moment, the clockwork of his mind ticking away behind his eyes. “You all fled Oinos and took refuge elsewhere on the Planes? Arcadia? Bytopia? Elysium?” he asks.

"Good guess! We wound up on Bytopia. Lovely place for refugees, but I preferred Sigil if I'm being honest."

“There everything has a price." Bastion opined. "And paying it to a willing seller enriches both. It sounds like you’ve been treading time and the Planes doing just this. But I meant that you’re doing more than collecting the tales you come across -- they’re becoming part of your own.”

"They are, though I never intended them to." Laurel turns and looks out to where the sun is dying on the horizon, but keeps her hand tucked under Bastion's chin so that his gaze does not follow hers. "But perhaps… perhaps it's what was meant to be. I was only following my nature. Curious and tenacious. And a pain in the ass, if you ask Cayn."

“Cayn, your paladin companion? Where is he now?”

"If you mean in my time? Probably frozen half in a dive to try and get the knife away from me. He knew this was coming though. There's a rule in storytelling that you don't mention something attention-getting unless you're going to bring it up later. I follow the god of martyrs and carry a sacrificial dagger." She briefly flashes the obsidian blade strapped to her wrist. Crimson winks at its edge. "That's not a detail to let slip idly."

Bastion nods. “I suppose I should have known that applied to Danar’s idle musings about snuffing out the sun, too.”

"Storytelling takes practice." She smiles softly.

“I suppose I have plenty of time, now, on this dying world to recount the tale of its fall. I know enough about the things that live here to know that none will survive on its surface without that star...”

Laurel can't help but quietly agree. "Well… I suppose since it seems like my shade is keeping you company, I can instruct you in the finer points. Is there a story you'd like to hear next?" 

Bastion starts forward a little, his mouth tightening almost imperceptibly as the plates in his armor grind together. “I want there to be a ‘next’. But I want to hear tales of this world, I think -- of what it is and might be. If I am to make it to your time, I am bound to this tower -- when I came here I thought Jabel Shammar would be the Heavens on Earth … It’s anything but. Though … whatever I am, I’m part of this plane now.”

Before Laurel can say anything further, the scene is subsumed by fog again. It seems to grow darker each time, and the looming presence just out of sight seems to get closer. Laurel swears that for the few seconds that her vision is occluded, she can hear soft breathing. But perhaps it is her own...

When her vision clears she finds herself in a place familiar from her Banewarrens adventuring days; the Shaft leading up to the Spire proper. Full of countless silver-limned doors all confining the banes. A familiar sort of respectful dread washes over as she turns in place, looking all around. Bastion stands next to her, appearing to examine the seals keeping the evils locked within their rooms.

"I have two stories." She's still prattling on, unfazed by the sudden shift of time and place since it caught her mid-thought. "One about my early years… arguably how I got embroiled in all this mess. And another… another about loyalty. Which I think you know something about. Wait… where or… when are we?"

Bastion whips around, his eyes kindling. “Laurel! You’re back! Five long months have passed -- but how can this world track time without its sun or moon?”

Laurel blinks several times. Five months. An even longer jump forward this time. It's a lot to take in. "I… are we in the Warrens?"

“The Spire itself." comes the reply. "The world dies around us and Danar dies above us. I last used an artifact in the Tower searching for life on this world -- there is a dim flicker of life far to the north, and a few stubborn animals holding on far to the south. And a few thinking minds await their last stand to our north. The surface is overrun with death, hunger, cold, and undead.”

Laurel nods, cataloging what he's telling her. It fits well with what she knows of how the world slowly succumbed to Danar's freezing madness. "Would you like to know who they are? Those people to the North? And the faint flicker?"

“Yes…" Bastion hesitates, licking his lips to sample the question before asking it. "Is it too late for them?”

Laurel weighs her response carefully. "Speaking plainly, yes. But also no." A rather incongruously pleased smile blossoms on her lips. "See? I'm getting good at this whole vague shifty touched-by-otherworldliness thing." She doesn't give Bastion a chance this time to fix her with his humorless stare. She touches his vambrace, pulling him along beside her as she starts to move through the shaft. "Walk with me. I want to have a look around in here… I barely remember it from the first time."

Together they float and flit about the veritable archive of evils as Laurel recounts the last stand of life on Praemal.

"To the north, at the mouth of a cave that leads far far far underground is where Parnaith and those with her will make their last stand on the surface. They will eventually run out of spells and supplies, and when the abominations that crawl across the face of Praemal ultimately overpower them, the refugees will flee into the Underdark."

Bastion starts at her name. “Parnaith? She’s alive still? Even now?” It's as if the sound of her name... The very speaking of it is a balm to his mind. Something in him changes every time he hears it.

The earnestness… the hope in his eyes breaks Laurel's heart. "For now." she answers softly. "She'll die protecting those that followed her, but not before she transcends this fate. She goes with them even as she falls."

Bastion seems to take this as a matter of course in the crushing miasma that has been his reality. “All is lost, then -- she was the very last one in Jabel Shammar who held out against the darkness that was overtaking the place.”

Laurel can't help but smile at this. "She won't be gone. Not forever. She has a… what do you lot call it? There's a fancy religious word for it. An apotheosis? Something like that. She becomes a Power on the Planes."

Bastion sighs as he takes this in. “She always dreamt of a subversion of what it meant to be a Power -- creating a path to transcendence that didn’t involve amassing magical or mundane might, but in the perfection of the self. But … certainly not like this! Toward the end she preached the utter rejection of power, even to Danar. Even when it came to power over evil. What happened to her?”

Laurel's surroundings fade to mist again, and she hears a scratching, scraping sound -- interspersed with inhuman howling. Whatever presence had followed her through the fog of these changes seems distant now… as if it's withdrawing from where she's going, and it's a decidedly unsettling sensation. Even though the unknown presence wasn't exactly comforting to begin with.

As her vision clears she sees Bastion again, standing in what looks like a torture chamber. Dried blood is smeared everywhere, but in places the smears seem incomplete, as though someone has tried to clean them up a bit. Torture equipment is everywhere. Hooks hang from the ceiling, a rack dominates the center of the room, and alchemical equipment looms along one wall that Laurel recognizes as stuff to extract, distill, purify, and administer liquid pain. There are claw and cut marks on the granite walls, along with blackened scorch marks. Bastion stands there, taking in the scene with a grim set to his jaw.

"I suppose the beginning of Parnaith's story as I know it is-" Laurel stops dead as her vision truly clears. "What in the hell? Where are you? Bastion? Can you hear me?" She spins in place before she finds him in the gloom of the chamber.

Bastion turns, blinking in surprise. "Laurel! You’re alive! -- or, should I say, you’re back!" As he turns to face her, the shattered remnants of his wings reflexively flaring out for balance as he suddenly turns.

She nods, still gazing around the torture chamber with a stunned expression. "Yes… yes, back is probably the best term at this point. Where… where are we? Or do I even want to know?" Her eyes flicker from the marred walls to his equally marred wings. They seem worse somehow. More plates have been added, twisting them into unnatural shapes. She does her level best not to stare.

"This is one of Jabel Shammar’s torture rooms, where Danar tortured captives to death and extracted liquid pain from their agony to use for various rites." Bastion explains in a detached voice. "But you haven’t asked the other question, I think, that’s on your mind."

Laurel's expression turns thoughtful as she finally lets herself look. "What happened to your wings? I never asked."

"I’ve not had a chance to stretch them in a few years," Bastion says darkly. "Stuck inside here as I am, now.

"You'll get to one day. I promise." Laurel tells him impulsively.

Something like a smile flickers at the edge of Bastion's mouth. "You say that with absolute certainty -- and that gives me hope. But how can you know what the future holds? My future may not be yours, it seems."

"Of course it isn't. There will come a point where it is no one's but yours. I don't think we're there yet. But… well… when are we exactly?"

Bastion heaves a heavy sigh. "Five years after the last sunrise, about -- my reckoning is unsure since I can’t see the stars or moon from here. And," He hesitates, the next statement sticking in his throat like a shard of bone. "A few days after the death of Danar Rotansin, greatest priest of Praemal, my master, and the downfall of this world."

Laurel reels a little at this news. And while she's not exactly mournful, she still feels the loss almost physically. "So he is gone then." She says softly. "I'm… I'm sorry for your loss, Bastion." She hopes that he knows that she is sincere, but she also can't help chewing on the words a bit… as if she's not really sure how they feel coming out of her mouth, even though she means them. Danar had cast a long shadow over her world. And even though he was dead long before she ever passed the gates of Ptolus, it still feels strange and somber to be present, or near enough, at his passing.

Bastion shakes his head. "I have seen thousands of your kind die, and thousands mourn their loss. Death sometimes comes quickly and suddenly, and mourners lament death; but sometimes the end comes slowly, and the harsher loss is the slow decline leading up to the final mercy at the end. I have watched the families of your kind watch their elders sit in a chair, rocking back and forth, their minds slowly wasting away over years, until the remnants are too feeble to even eat, and then they starve. Is that a tragedy for those left behind, or a release? I don’t know. But I have seen the latter, here."

"It can be both." Laurel rests her hand on his armored forearm. "There's no shame in it being both."

"Of course." the angel aceeds. "And here I am talking about this, when I came to this plane originally hoping to stand with my flaming sword between death and the mortals of this plane." He gives a rough cough of humorless laughter. "How far I have fallen… that is the loss I most acutely mourn. Danar’s death… frees me, I think."

"Will you leave, then? The tower? This plane?"

Bastion shakes his head again. "I can’t. Jabel Shammar is sealed tight -- Danar, toward the end, became even more paranoid, and reinforced the barriers around the tower. Plus, the energies of this place have become interwoven with me. Do you see that?" He points to the granite of the wall -- Laurel notices, but only out of the corner of her eye, that the pieces surrounding some of the bloodstains have turned… fuzzy, like the purple moss growing from Bastion’s armor, rippling slightly in a phantom breeze.

"If I leave here … I don’t have long to live." Bastion says this very matter of factly, biting the words off cleanly. "And, truthfully -- that may be my fate, since I am not sure what existence I have left. But I am, at least for a time, mourning Danar -- whatever he was in different times, he fell from an enormous height, and that should be remembered." Bastion casts his glowing eyes around the grim scene surrounding them. "Do you know what this place was, in the end, to him?"

Laurel shakes her head, peering up at him. "Tell me."

Bastion looks out at the grim scene in front of them, with its legacy of pain and blood. "Ten more days of life."

Laurel frowns, not quite sure what he's getting at. "What did he do with those ten days?"

"Tried, desperately, to buy himself a few more -- which he did. But only a few. The corpses scattered around Jabel Shammar, the remnants of the battle you found me in… once they were tokens of his victory. But they became his last desperate larder. He stripped the frozen flesh off of any bones he could find, boiled it, and ate it. Then he cracked the bones of his defeated enemies open and sucked their marrow.”

Laurel feels herself turn a little green around the gills at the image that conjures. 

"Danar, ultimately, was a mortal man." Bastion explained, slipping out from under her touch and moving slowly to pace about the room. "I say that not to debase him -- we angels know all too well the power mortals have, which in the end outstrips ours. That’s one of the lesser-known secrets of Celestia. But … he was mortal, and in the end? In a world with no sun, no more growing plants, no more animals … he starved to death, wasting away as a shell with sunken eyes and bones poking through his paper-thin skin. 

"This was a torture cell -- where in his saner years he pulled the souls of his victims out as their screams fed his machinations. But in his last few days, after he had exhausted all the flesh and the bones in his castle-prison? He tapped the dregs of his faltering magic to detonate a fireball in the room, then licked the blood from the floor and walls before it froze again."

Laurel looks at the floor again, examining the interrupted patterns of blood with new insight. Clear tracks in the shape of long stripes bisect the stains. Obvious evidence that Bastion is not exaggerating in the slightest.

Laurel swallows visibly as her stomach turns an unpleasant flip. "Y'know… I've seen some torture chambers in my time actually." She said, fighting to keep a nauseated quaver out of her voice. "Been strapped into one. Used a makeshift one myself until I thought better of it. I've actually seen a torture chamber where an anesthetic was part of the victim's agony. Remind me to tell you his story sometime." She wags a finger at Bastion. "Hell, him you might actually meet one of these days. But this…" She scuffs a boot over the bizarre bloody tracery, but of course it doesn't leave a mark. "This is a new one."

Bastion frowns. "A new one?"

"Just…" She shakes her head and actually laughs for lack of a better reaction. "That's some next-level desperation. Says something of how far his rational mind had fallen." she turns her harrowed gaze to Bastion, seeing his predicament in a new light. "And you were chained to it."

"It took two years. He pillaged much of the world -- the few remaining corners where life had hung on the longest -- for food, just for himself, desperately searching for the last breaths of life on the world he had killed. Most of the animal life had been consumed by -- or become -- undead. But," Bastion shakes his head. "His mind went, too. Paranoia trapped him in this tower, as he came to believe that the lack of food in the world outside was a great conspiracy against him, and the maddening tendrils gripping his mind robbed him of his ability to plan. The sad thing is -- he could have sustained himself indefinitely. His magic flickered and guttered because of starvation; it’s well-known that mortals need sustenance to fuel their connections to the Weave. But he could have kept a room in this castle lit and warm with his magic, and grown crops or even raised livestock there. 

"But … the idea of creation became anathema to him. It’s been a long while since he has been able to even countenance green and growing things, or light, or the cultivation of anything alive. Are you familiar with the disease your people call ‘hydrophobia’? Sufferers become parched and thirsty, but whenever they try to drink, their throats spasm in agony, and they can’t swallow water -- it gets to the point where even the sight of water drives them mad in desire and desperation and horror. Part of Danar’s tragedy is… well, he lusted for his old life, surrounded by growth and light, but he couldn’t have it, and so even the thought of life and tenderness came to send him into agony and rage. And, thus cut off from any ability to nurture new life, he fed only on the dregs of the old, in a world where these could never be renewed.

“In the end, he wasted away and starved.”

"And I imagine that spread to everything under his… "care."" Laurel reaches out to Bastion again, resting her hand on a different plate of his armor and watching with rapt attention as her touch chases the fuzzy film of the corruption away.

"Something like that, yes." Bastion confirms. "Now you understand, a bit, of what my fall has entailed, since I bound myself to him. I could have saved him -- but enough of my power was invested in his care that I couldn’t bend it to his salvation in any of the dozen ways that I once would have been able to. And there is … something horrible at the heart of Jabel Shammar that even now grows, and thinks, and plans."

"The Book." Laurel breathes, her nose wrinkling as if the mere mention of the accursed thing fouls the air.

"Yes." Bastion says bitterly. "It was the architect of his fall, all along." 

"I know a little of it. Its corrupting influence. My compatriots and I have had horrible nightmares that we've come to understand to be visions… glimpses of this evil."

"If you have enough power to reach ten thousand years in the past simply out of a refusal to let fallen angels lie, then … well, if anyone has enough power to stand against it, you do." He deigns to give her a half-smile. "But I fear that the Book might be just the beginning, if you want to uproot the corruption entirely."

"I don't know much about… well much of anything." Laurel shrugs. "But I know a thing or two about stories… and a pervasive truth throughout all the stories I know is that one thing always leads to another. A goose chase through a crypt, led to another through the Banewarrens, led to a political fight in the city, led to an all out war against an army of fireproofed trolls, led to the realization that the sun had gone out (again), led to a realization that we had to jump planes, which led to a journey across the multiverse which taught us that lots of people have lots of opinions about whether or not the sun in Praemal should be on or off… which lead us to a giant fucking fish which taught your Book how to mess around with the time magic… which I'm sure will lead us on another wild goose chase." Here she pauses to inhale. "Honestly at this point, I just hope they aren't fiendish geese."

Laurel had hoped for a real smile at that joke. She even made herself laugh a little at that one. But no such luck. Bastion doesn't even crack a smile.

"Artifacts like this … are usually made by fiends." he says very seriously.

"I live in hope." She sighs in desperation. "But you're probably right. One thing at a time, I suppose. You wanted another story, didn't you?"

Bastion nods, his eyes glinting with a little bit of restrained eagerness. "Yes. I fear I’ve told you one of horror and suffering, of the most powerful man on this planet reduced to licking blood off the floor to try to survive, until even this ran out and he withered away. But yours … well, they aren’t free from horror, but in the end there’s always hope. That’s how it always goes with the best tales involving mortals, which is why we admire you so."

"You're telling me your tale, truth be told." Laurel encourages. "And there's hope in it too. At least for me, since I believe I know how it ends."

"I know how my tale ends, actually." He says, his visage clouding further. "At least a little. There are oracles in Heaven, and I know that in the end I am surrounded by darkness and corruption, standing atop a tower looming large over a world of despair. The oracle seems to have gotten it right."

Laurel snorts dryly. "There's more than one tower in a land of despair besides this one. I've seen a few of them actually." She elbows him and makes him look at her. "Fun fact? Oracles, no matter their alignment or planar allegiance are generally vague as a rule, and you shouldn't take their words so literally."

"Perhaps." And he finally smiles. It's a creaky expression, almost as if he doesn't remember how to do it, but for Laurel, she'll take it over a renewed sunrise. "Tell me your tale -- but not here. Come. If you be corporeal, stand aside…"

Bastion gestures with both hands, casting a spell, and Laurel makes a little hop to the side to try and get out of the way. But the spell brings forth a swarm of meteors and there is really nowhere to hide. The impact blasts holes in the granite walls, smashing everything in the room to rubble in the confined space, and turning all the tools into molten slag that quickly cools and solidifies in dull puddles.

"There goes my other eyebrow." Laurel whines blandly, scrubbing at her face.

Bastion still doesn't laugh. He strides powerfully from the room, but stumbles in the rubble having clearly drained himself with the spell. Where his knee hits the stone floor, ichor oozes out and he grits his teeth.

"Easy…" Laurel bends next to him with her left hand pressed lightly on the plate between his shoulders. The strange moss continues to recoil from her touch and she does her best to chase it from his armor as she waits for him to catch his breath.

"So … you had a tale for me?" Bastion pants, looking up at her.

She nods enthusiastically. "I do! I was going to tell you about Parnaith. You seemed curious about what happened to her. Though curious is far too mild a word."

Bastion's eyes kindle at her name. "She was the last one who kept the original virtues of our quest alive. If you know anything of her history you know, I think, about her extraordinary grace and humility and devotion. She, in the end, was the best of Praemal. What happened to her?"

"Luckily for you, what I know of her story with any certainty starts where Danar's downfall begins. So I can pick up where you left off, I think… if you'll help me that is. By the battle at the top of the Warrens, where I first reached out to you, she had long since fled. Or at least so I imagine. I don't really have any way to be sure. Do you remember how long it was from the time she left to the day you fought Rassilon?"

Bastion frowns in thought. "Probably …. Four months?"

Laurel nods assimilating the information into the narrative in her head. "I had a vision… long before I had even the barest inkling that my role in this might be anything more than a gallivanting storyteller in a fancy cape. I still don't know why it came to me. What prompted it or what I was supposed to learn at that time... but I've since fallen out of the habit of asking such silly questions."

Bastion's shoulders heave in a shrug. "Given Parnaith’s status as a visionary and an oracle? She may well have imprinted it on Praemal itself to be found by those who follow in her footsteps. 

"Perhaps so. Perhaps so…" Laurel nods. "That would make the most sense… it was the first vision of two that I had about Parnaith." 

"The first was thus, recounted in full. I saw a dark-haired woman, clad only in a thin white robe standing in a snow-covered pine forest at the edge of a frozen pond. She wept bitterly and the tears that didn't freeze on her face melted the ice in the pond and allowed her to cast scry. She watched an astounding fight taking place around the Spire… first from the outside, full of fiends and flying creatures that swarmed around the Spire and then she looked in on the battle that raged within the walls of the fortress. She watched as Rassilon's spell was completed, to no effect, and his forces decimated by… well by you and the rest of Danar's company." 

Bastion's face had gone blank. "She watched the whole thing?"

"Right to the very end." Laurel confirmed. "She didn't let herself look away until it was over. I'll never forget the sound of her crying. I'd never heard grief like that. I have now… but that's a story for another time."

"In the version you saw … who won? I thought you said that a drow chorus appeared to turn the tide?”

"That hadn’t happened yet. This is the version of history you’re living in, where Danar triumphed." Laurel replied. "And when the battle was finished, Parnaith gathered herself, wiped the scrying away along with her tears, and went to make preparations for her refugees."

Bastion listens with rapt attention as Laurel continues. There's an excitement for news kindled in his bright eyes, but also a bone-deep ache for what he lost when she left.

"I had another vision… sometime later." Laurel went on. "In truth I didn't know what I was watching at first. The scene was a flurry of strange activities in a setting I couldn't quite make sense of. A ragged camp with ragged tenants. Dwarves and men in well-used battle gear smashing jewelry with warhammers. I didn't understand what they were doing at first. The jewelry appeared to be very fine. Some of it was of Dwarven make for sure. Dwarves smashing their own creations? I thought maybe it was just a dream… some sort of instructive… I don't know what I thought. But eventually I realized it was a vision from the alternate timeline." 

"These people were nearly frozen to death. They were half-starved, hounded into a corner, and smashing jewelry for the diamond dust to resurrect people as fast as their few clerics could conjure up the spells. There were only a few dozen actual fighting souls left, protecting several dozen more civilians. The situation was beyond desperate."

"And it was made all the more grim when their scouts came running back to the encampment with abominations on their heels. Illithids… undead… everything evil and still hungry was hurtling down on them. They all wearily readied their weapons. This was it… the last stand on the surface." 

"Of course when the abominations fell upon them, they dropped like flies. They were out of spells… out of energy… exhausted and freezing…"

Bastion sat forward, eyes searching her face. "This was the end, then? Of the very last survivors?" 

Laurel let herself smile then, knowing she's got him on the hook. "No. That's where Parnaith comes in."

Bastion jumps at the mention of her name. "What? She was with them? I’m surprised that with her power they were overcome… but, then, toward the end she rejected any sort of aspiration for power, and from what you’ve told me she replaced that in the end with despair."

"Despair is not an end unto itself always." Laurel says. "Sometimes it can be the fire that reignites hope when all seems lost.

"See… Parnaith was there. She had run herself out of spells and energy trying to keep her people alive. But even her power, great as it was, it was fading with the world around her and it wasn't enough to keep them all standing. And that's when she laid her conventional role aside. She knew her time as a peacemaker and healer was over, and if she was to truly protect people, it would be through force.

"She stepped forward as the horde of abominable creatures hailed down on their battered company. No armor. No defensive magic. And, get this… she picked up, of all things, a bastard sword. Wielding it one-handed, she broke into this ecstatic dance under the starlight. And she held them off… held off the horrors until her people could escape through a crack in the earth that led to a cave system which opened into the Underdark.

"She fell, in the end. Magical flame cast by some illithid sorcerer burned off her robe and blackened her skin, but she fought to the very last. And she was not forgotten. Those who escaped were given power through her sacrifice… power to transform themselves and survive in the darkness under the surface. They became the first Drow." 

Bastion hangs his head. “So Parnaith fell. The very best thing about Praemal is gone. I bid her soul a gentle path to the afterlife and an eternity of rest and peace, and that her petitions find waiting ears in the Heavens or wherever her spirit finds a home.” He recites this last as a benediction, apparently words he has learned long ago. He looks at Laurel quizzically then, and cocks his head in curiosity. “But who are the Drow?”

Laurel feels herself smile, still resting a steadying hand on Bastion's armor. Her ghostly fingers glide smoothly through the surface without touching it, but their presence does chase the fuzzy growth of corruption away, and the gesture seems to bring him comfort. "She's not any more "gone" from this world than Fiona is. Her sacrifice saved a whole people. Created an entire race whose culture… history… talents… they ultimately saved Praemal." She lifts his face, letting her fingers skim along the armor plating on his throat. "The Drow are Parnaith's children. The dark elves. You've never heard of them because they haven't been created yet, but one day, I'll introduce you. There is an enclave that still honors her with a positively ecstatic ritual. They dance in the starlight with bastard swords atop a giant mesa in the Beastlands. Naked, even. It's quite a sight. Eilistraee they call her." 

Bastion rocks back a little at this news. "So … she survived her own death, as a martyr? As a petitioner? As … a Power?" As Laurel examines his face, she sees his eyes burning fiercely but quenched inside by… tears perhaps? Tears long unshed for his lost companion. "This is the first I’ve heard … of the hope for this world. They saved Praemal? They still live under the earth, then, away from the cold? In your time, I mean."

"Some of them do. Others live on the Beastlands." Her mouth pulls in a sad grimace. "The ones that remained though on this plane though… it did not go exactly as they had planned. The world that they saved was not kind to them in turn. They discovered they had no place under the sun that they had restored… or so they thought. So they went back underground. And their spite and hurt gave birth to the worship of… less savory characters who sought to prey on their unfulfilled desires. I… I do hope we are not similarly met with hardship." 

"The Sun, though? They were able to restore it?" Bastion asks. "Change the past? Change what Danar did?"

Laurel nods, shifting a little to sit more comfortably. "They came to the time sink with a new sort of magic. They could use the power of music to bolster the spellcasting abilities of others, and so, two thousand years later, they returned to the surface, made their way to the battle and quite literally sang their way to victory by strengthening the spells of their forebears. And casting a few of their own… mostly support type stuff. It was… pretty astounding, to tell the truth. That's what I meant when I said I was supposed to use a whole choir to cast this spell…" She gestures around herself. "Not just myself."

"I think I see now…" Bastion says nodding with a slow dawning of understanding. "You and your allies have returned wielding this same power that saved this world once before. This must be some impressive magic…"

Laurel sits forward eagerly, a sparkle in her eye. "Would you like to see how it works? I can show you."

"Sure."

"Here…" She sits facing him, cross legged with an irrepressibly-excited smile. "Cast a spell for me. Something that I can't cast."

"I don’t quite know what you are capable of, Laurel Weaver-Of-Tales … but …" He thinks for a brief moment and then casts Fire Shield, wreathing himself in blue-white fire. 

Laurel closes her eyes, letting the waves of the Weave flow through her. She catches them in places, humming notes in harmony with Bastion's magic. It's a strong spell and she doesn't truly have the power to cast it on her own. So the Weave draws it forcibly out of her body, like the drag of a cat of nine tails over well-whipped skin. She feels the gush of something warm at her throat, but when she opens her eyes, the sight of Bastion's rapt expression through a haze of blue-white flame chases all other thoughts from her mind.

"Nifty, right?" She asks, holding out her arms and watching the magical flames lick painlessly over her skin.

"Impressive!" he booms with a grin. "We have heard of this sort of power in Heaven -- used by our sometimes-antagonists, the Valar of Arborea, to weave their world into existence. But I had no idea that it could be tamed by mortals!" But his eyes dart down to her throat, spying what currently looks like a shallow scratch just under her jaw. "Laurel… your neck! You’re bleeding -- how did that happen? Are you fighting in your own time as you talk to me across the ages?"

Laurel sighs inwardly and puts her hand to her neck. Sure enough, her fingers come away stained and wet. She knew she'd have to explain this part sooner or later, and in her exuberance, she'd made it sooner. "No, not exactly. See… this magic doesn't come free. There's a certain amount I can do free of "charge" so to speak… but bigger spells and bigger effects come at a price." She searches in vain for words to soften the reality of what she's done, if only for Bastion's sake. But she gives up. There's no way to hide the fact that this magic is powered by her lifeblood and she gave it up willingly just… for what? 

She pushes the question out of her mind and continues. "Let’s just say… I can't cast Time Stop… or Empowered Time Stop… and certainly not Epic Time Stop or whatever this fancy-time-freezing-jumping-whatever is. Not without… paying up so to speak. It's why this stuff works best in groups where you can pool your resources."

She has to make a joke. She has to. She'll go insane if she doesn't. So she dabs at the blood beginning to weep out of the gash, ignoring the fact that she's pretty sure she can feel bone inside the cut. "This is going to get everywhere, isn't it?" she says, staring at the red stain on her fingers. "God… now I get why you're only a martyr once. The dry cleaning bills are what make up the legend, not the actual dying."

Bastion blinks twice and then shakes his head. “You are literally dying in your own timestream… and you’re cracking wise about it. You are something else, Laurel Weaver-Of-Tales." He smiles then and Laurel forgets for a moment that she'd ever questioned why she'd done this to herself. "What do you hope to buy with your own death?"

She mirrors the expression on his face as she wipes her hand clean on her pants. "First off… I crack wise about everything. Just ask my compatriots when you meet them and they'll tell you. The only thing smart on me is my mouth. But yes. I think I'm probably done for whenever this conversation actually ends. Which apparently draws out for a few millennia in your world but for me… I reckon I get a couple of hours? It's honestly hard to say. And for my friends? It'll be six seconds max. Cayn is going to be livid."

"There are lots of sorts of smarts … and, Laurel?" She looks up at him when she hears her name linger in his mouth again. "Wherever in the Upper Planes you wind up as a petitioner won’t quite know what to do with you."

She lifts one shoulder in a shrug. "No one ever seems to. And Bastion? You know what I bought with my life?"

“Not until you tell me, I’m afraid…”

Laurel huffs out a sigh. "I don't actually know yet. I had no idea what I was doing when I reached out to you this way. I just knew it needed to be done, because… because you came to save us and I'm the one who sent you. But if I'm honest. The fact that I've gotten you to smile twice only a few days after Danar's passing is more than worth it. You'll have to figure out what else I've bought, I guess."

A long silence stretches between them as they regard each other. Bastion doesn't smile again exactly, but there's a serenity creeping into him at the edges that makes Laurel's heart ache with joy. She knows that he’s not fated to wither away in despair and die in this tower. She knows that this world will see another sunrise. Maybe, just maybe, she’s convinced him those things are possible, too.

"Come on…" She stands and puts out her hand. "Let's go see the stars. It's been awhile for me actually. Funnily enough, I have a story to go with them."

"You are a strange one, Laurel." he says, rising stiffly to his feet, but with a smile coloring his voice. "But that’s mortals for me, I suppose. I will go watch the stars with you, then, and hear your tale and…" He sees her growing faint and cloudy next to him. "Wait, no! … This fickle magic that’s brought you to me … you’re fading again, Laurel. But you will be back, I hope. I will wait for you under the stars, even if it takes a thousand years…”

The last thing Laurel sees before her vision obscures is him touching his armor… the bracer with her name on it... with a tenderness that such a broad frame shouldn't allow. And there's a power in his words that strikes at her very heart, seeming to push her deeper into the hazy smoke that engulfs her.

***


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I think I jumped again…" Laurel says, her face scrunching up in frustration as she takes in her new surroundings.
> 
> "Laurel!" Bastion turns to face her, a thin sheet of ice cracking away from his skin as he does. “You came back! I was worried you were just a fever-dream of the past…”
> 
> "How long was I gone this time? I'm almost afraid to ask." She moves beside him and begins to pick the ice off his armor as he still stands motionless, her half-elven eyes noticing in the dim glint from the sky above new etching on the plates. A section bolted to his upper arm catches her gaze in particular: 
> 
> “Let's go see the stars.... I have a story to go with them.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here is chapter two of Laurel's adventure in saving fallen angels.
> 
> Please note that this chapter gets a massive warning for blood, violence, frank discussions about suicide/self-harm/martyrdom, and torture sequences. Please read at your discretion.

The fog that occludes Laurel's vision is nearly pitch black this time, more like the thick industrial smoke that pervaded the Lower Ward of Sigil. Gradually, it becomes patchy with grayish smudges visible in the mist. As she watches, the blotches slowly shrink and sharpen, resolving themselves finally into the brilliant, dizzying tapestry of the night sky. The stars shine bright and clear in the velvet dark of the firmament, while the long glowing smear of galactic light behind them arches above the lifeless and windless world beneath. 

Looking around herself now, Laurel finds herself high atop one of the three lesser towers of Jabel Shammar. The transparent stone beneath her feet glints in the starlight, but Laurel’s attention is quickly drawn to Bastion, standing near the parapet. He is motionless in the otherworldly way his armor has trained him to be. His skin and plating alike have a beautiful sheen... an almost crystalline patina under the piercing starlight, reflecting the distant light of hundreds of thousands of the dead sun’s kin. His sword lies on the stone beneath him as he looks out over the ruins of Ptolus and beyond to the glassy sheet of ice that is the sea, reflecting a distorted image of the sky above it.

"I think I jumped again…" Laurel says, her face scrunching up in frustration as she takes in her new surroundings.

"Laurel!" Bastion turns to face her, a thin sheet of ice cracking away from his skin as he does. “You came back! I was worried you were just a fever-dream of the past…”

"How long was I gone this time? I'm almost afraid to ask." She moves beside him and begins to pick the ice off his armor as he still stands motionless, her half-elven eyes noticing in the dim glint from the sky above new etching on the plates. A section bolted to his upper arm catches her gaze in particular:

> “Let's go see the stars.... I have a story to go with them.”

The words are in Celestial as she spoke them, but written with the Infernal alphabet.

“Hundreds and hundreds of years as you reckon them," came the answer which froze her heart to her ribs, far colder than the sunless chill of Praemal. "I told you I would wait for you under the stars; keeping that vigil and watching the last, long, final breath of this world has brought me closer to peace, or to death, or to both…”

Laurel's head spins at this information, so much so that she finds she needs to balance herself against the shoulder plate where she's rested her hand. He'd gone out here and just… waited? For hundreds of years, he'd just waited. She couldn't fathom that, let alone even think about it. The consequences and implications of that were too much to bring to bear on her poor brain. 

"The gaps are getting wider… I think my magic is waning," she mumbles almost to herself. Then she shakes her head and turns to him, desperate for something, anything, to do to help. "Bastion, you must be freezing up here. Celestial or no."

He stares out over the icy wasteland. “The cold is the least of my worries. The upper reaches of Celestia are freezing, too. But … it is calmer out here, away from the influence of the corruption in the heart of Jabel Shammar.” He waves a hand westward, toward the silhouette of another tower looming even taller against the stars.

Laurel shakes her head again, feeling the driving itch to act, even if it's in a foolish and trite way. "Nevertheless. Here. Take this. It will make me feel better at least" She pulls off her cloak with the torn corner and wraps it around him, stretching her arms up toward his shoulders, though his eight-foot tall frame made reaching them nearly impossible. "Bend down here, confound you. We're not all monoliths."

Bastion kneels awkwardly, his mouth pinching tight as the plates in his legs twist and grate in his skeleton. But the pain seems to be instantly chased away by the cloak settling about his massive shoulders. “Thank you. This doesn’t ward off the cold -- not here! -- but perhaps it will help with the rest of what I must endure." He turns to look at her now without the cloak to obscure her, but his eyes fall to her throat. "But you -- the wound on your neck is worse!" His hand flies to the cloak itself, bits of frozen blood cracking off as he touches it. "And there is blood on this…” 

Laurel reaches up to touch her neck and realizes her whole sleeve and part of the front of her shirt is soaked with blood. She gives a theatrically irritated sigh to cover her true shock. "Y'know… I'd bitch about this being my favorite shirt. But seriously, I'm not actually going to be alive long enough to miss it. But it was so pretty though!"

Bastion gives a bewildered shake of his head. "Whatever you become -- the Planes will make sure you’re robed in the brightest colors there are… since you create them yourself, it seems, through all your wondrous tales. I imagine there’s a tale behind even the tatters in this." He thumbs at the frayed edge of the corner of her cloak.

"There is actually." she says with a tender smile, reaching over and letting the threads fraying at the rough edge slip through her fingers. "And now that I think on it, you should keep it for the time being. As well as it's served me, I think it might come in handy for you now."

Bastion pulls the material as far around his broad shoulders as he can manage. It's less a cloak and more a mantle on his giant frame. “Thank you." he says, tipping his head back to stare up at the vault of stars overhead. "It’s remarkable -- after everything that’s happened here, everything this world has lost, the stars are brighter than ever.”

Laurel nods looking up as well. "You have more stars in your sky than I did in mine. Though, I was never one to appreciate the stars back then. Always had my nose to the ground, sniffing out a new story… new adventure… anything to keep boredom at bay. I was easily bored once upon a time. Never much time for stillness and stargazing. Say… speaking of stargazing… have I told you the story of Nebulosa, our awakened owl?"

Bastion thinks for a moment and then shakes his head. “No… you have animals among your band, then? And now -- it seems like you have ten thousand years for stargazing, and also only a few seconds...”

"Having things is not always the same as keeping them." Laurel cuts him off, slowly turning in place and searching for familiar celestial landmarks. Stargazing makes her come over all existential even when she's not bleeding out from a self-inflicted wound. She doesn't need the help. "I suppose we do have one animal with us, unless you count that time Kalessin had an identity crisis and turned himself into a dragon. But that is another tale entirely. Nebulosa is her name. She's a great gray owl full of equal parts fluff and claws." 

“I remember long ago that was one of the more remarkable parts of this world -- there were so many different kinds of beasts here, far more than anywhere in the Planes except the Beastlands. But I don’t think I know of those...“

"Nebulosa's kind live in the forests north of here. She's about so tall, and about so wide." Laurel demonstrates with her hands. "With gray feathers, bright amber eyes, and fluffy feet with sharp talons. Do you remember when you last cast your awareness to your surrounds, hunting for signs of life and you found a the tiniest glimmer far away to the north? That was the awakened owl companion of a long dead druid. The last of a circle that met in a copse of sequoia trees… giant evergreens that would tower over the tallest buildings of Ptolus in my time."

His eyes light with recognition, and he stands clumsily, the plates restricting his motion, to look off towards the north. "I saw those trees! Long ago, flying around the world -- I didn’t get close enough to see the animals in them. But those are the largest trees I’ve seen anywhere in the Planes, except for Yggdrasil and the Beastlands. Your owl … she was the last survivor in the North, then?"

"Yes, sadly… The druids of course died off one by one as did all the humans on the surface. But Nebulosa, with her toasty feathers and her exceptional power as a druid, kept going long after they all had passed. But eventually she succumbed to cold and starvation too. However her spirit did not pass on. Even past the end of her natural life, her ghost still guarded the grove as the trees petrified across the millennia. And eventually, as the centuries crept by, she fell into despair.

"And so deep was her despair that she was subsumed along with her grove of now petrified trees beyond this plane to Oinos, where her grief grew ever deeper. Bereft of all things green and growing, and now of the vault of stars overhead, her heart ached for the home and the companions that she lost.

"But she did not lose hope. 

"No, the tiny owl would save her spells, what few she was granted every few months, and she would call up gusts of wind to gather the tiny fallen pine cones from the corners of the grove. She did this so that one day, perhaps someone would come along and help her revive her grove."

Bastion reeled a little in surprise. "She haunted her dead trees as a ghost in Oinos? How did she survive the Blood War, which no doubt tried to sweep her away like it does everything there, eventually?"

"Take it from me. It helps to be very small." Laurel says, leaning on the bannister. "And a ghost's horrific visage coupled with a few well-placed lightning bolts can do wonders as deterrents. Even to fiends. We found the charred corpse of a nalfeshnee near her grove. It looked like it had been left out on a mountaintop in a thunderstorm.”

Something kindles in Bastion's gilded eyes and he gives her the barest flash of a wicked grin. Laurel finds herself unconsciously mimicking it. This is what she came here for. Because for a moment, with feisty Nebulosa flitting around behind his eyes, firing off lightning bolts at a hapless lumbering demon unable to catch her ghostly form, Laurel feels she gets a glimpse of who Bastion once was. When he first came to Danar… young perhaps by the reckoning of his own kind. A spitfire. Vicious and alive, like Saffron or Merrysparkle. A creature of righteous action and unconquerable zeal.

But the frisson of the moment passes as quickly as it came. "I suppose she had to ration those, too, like the rest of her magic." Bastion says. "But this world is full of small feisty creatures, especially its half-elves…"

Laurel smiles at that, unable to stop herself. And she feels her cheeks flush, even in the unearthly cold of Praemal’s sunless atmosphere. He'd surprised her with the mildly snide remark. It's the closest thing to a joke he's ever made in her presence, and she finds herself wondering what sort of sense of humor he might have had before all of this. "We are a troublesome lot, so I'm told. Half in one world and half in another. And always finding some kind of trouble to get into. Or at least I am.

"Hell… I'm one of three half-elves in my travelling company. We were the ones that came along past Nebulosa's grove, stumbling through the Grey Waste looking for the path to Requiem with fiends on our heels. Nebulosa nearly blasted us to the far side of the Planes as well until we convinced her we were friendly. We took her with us ultimately, along with all the little pinecones she'd managed to collect across the many thousands of years. Saffron, our party rogue and seer, still has them…. and even planted one of them. On Bytopia it grew quickly into a towering treant we named Warmth-Comes-Again."

Bastion gives his head a sharp, clearing shake. “Wait … that ghost survived and protected her seeds … for ten thousand years? You found her in Oinos, still sane, still … intact?”

"More or less. I mean… she was brokenhearted to the point that the petrified remnants of her grove had sunk to Oinos. But when we told her we could fix her trees and perhaps even restore the sun to Praemal, she agreed to tag along. Took her a few tries to perch on someone's shoulder… ethereal talons and all that."

Bastion laughs a little at the image. The sound is like music to Laurel's ears. “It sounds like her long vigil wasn’t in vain, then… even if she forgot how to be a bird. But how do you remove a ghost from its haunt?”

"We planted one of her trees and brought it with us. She was bound “to the High Grove of Praemal”... and, once there was a living tree again, that was it! So she haunted the sapling in its little pot! And as for Nebulosa herself, we found a new body for her eventually. A sick and dying old owl on the plane of Elysium offered up one of her eggs, since she knew she wouldn't be able to raise the chick. And so Nebulosa hatched anew. She was so scrawny and funny looking when she came out. Have you ever seen a baby owl? They're the saddest looking creatures.

"But she's all grown up now with a handsome crop of gray feathers. And a handsome set of magic spells to boot. She tags along with us, hoping to see her home restored aright. But for now she's content to perch in Warmth-Comes-Again."

“She’s with you -- on this world?" He shakes his head again in bewilderment. "What a life and unlife and rebirth she’s had. But my mind goes to her long lonely vigil in that stone tree, surrounded by the horrors of Hell… as that’s somewhat akin to what I’m facing here." He heaves as deep a sigh as the plates along his ribs allow. "Five hundred years, Laurel. Five hundred years I waited for you on this height -- and, yet, the bondage of my oath to you was one of the few things giving me comfort. Even when I longed to throw myself into the field of annihilation that surrounds this place, or impale myself on my own sword… that choice was no longer mine, since I bound myself to you willingly. But, in the end, those bonds have been a comfort, not servitude. Giving up a little slice of my will, here, has been a source of solace and strength, perhaps.”

The bondage of my oath to you. The words fall on Laurel's ear like infernal hammer strikes, freezing her where she stands in a way that has nothing to do with the cold that she can only vaguely be aware of.

She turns to him slowly, her expression honed sharp with concern as she watches him laboriously kneel once more. She takes in the slight bend of his shoulders. The cast of his eyes. The tone of his voice. She knows this scene. Knows these words even if they've never been spoken out loud before. 

Her mind calls back to the memory of Searos, now called Celestin, when he'd taken the guise of a young woman to hide in the streets of the City of Elua. He had looked so petrified and lost out in the open and on his own. His will had never been his own before. He was practically begging for someone to do… something for him. All the betrayal and poison heaped on him by the heretics at House Shahrizai and yet what he was made him still crave possession and direction. Just as what Bastion was bent him to a craving of order, even now. Even after everything, they both desired structure… regulation… an ordering hand, though each in different measure in accordance with their nature.

"Be careful, Bastion." Laurel warned, her voice low as she regarded him. "I am not Danar. And I am certainly no Parnaith. You have told me stories in exchange for my own of how even they, pillars of this world that they are, were not static entities. That they were ever, if slowly, changing. I am no different save only in the fact that I am more capricious than they ever were. And perhaps capable of more viciousness, though I lack their power. I cannot promise you… well, I can't promise you anything, actually. I keep forgetting that I'm dying." She pauses to lick her lips and thinks very very hard about what to say next. She knows what he needs. But something tells her it's not just his nature that's pleading for it. She moves to stand in front of him, careful to keep her hands to herself while they have this conversation.

At length she finally speaks. "If this is what you need me to be, then I can be that. If you're looking for… I don't know. Something farther reaching… like greater purpose? Moral fortitude? Whatever it was that bound you to Danar and made you love Parnaith? I can't do that. But I can hold still and be what gets you out of here when the time comes. That I can do. Does… does that make sense?"

His mouth pulls in that humorless way as he takes in her words. "It’s peculiar, isn’t it? I, a planetar, one of the mightiest of the angelic host, and I’ve spent my whole existence following orders, and then looking for someone whose yoke I could be proud to wear, serving the ideals I held dear. I thought that was Danar. Now, here at the end of all things, at least for this world, as everything else that doesn’t come from the pits of hell crumbles around me, I’m trying to discover how to actually have a will of my own. 

"And I’m bad at it -- and, once in a while, someone else’s will is welcome, to hold mine up as it falters, to give me a rest. You I trust, Laurel -- not to seek to conquer, not to be some sort of hegemon, even one haloed in radiance. I shall not swear an oath of loyalty to you as I did Danar -- but, in time, I may willingly ask you to do this thing for me."

Laurel heaves a heavy sigh as she thinks very long and hard about this. The silence surrounding them is deafening. "Then I will do this thing for you." she says finally, laying her hand on his shoulder. "I only wanted to be sure of what you were asking. I did it for another not so long ago, though only for a moment. A young man who bled every kind of submission from every pore in his body and was taken advantage of in countless ways for decades. He… I had to actually explain the concept of consent to him. It was that bad."

"But you helped him, it seems." Bastion replies, his eyes guileless and earnest. "To submit to someone yet to do so willingly, to follow another’s command even though he had no desire to do otherwise? Where is he now, I wonder?"

"You'll meet him. He fights with the others at the temple below in the city." She peers over the edge of the parapet down to the city below. "He'll be easy to spot… only has one eye. Celestin is his name.

"He was easy to help. He only needed me to be what he needed for a short time. Just a few moments. When his freedom was won, we quickly discovered that his bondage had warped his sense of… autonomy? But we needed to get him through the city and to the temple where he would serve as evidence against his captors. And so I took him as my charge, so to speak. It was… It's surreal to look back on now. Especially since I understand the appeal of such an arrangement, though less in the extreme of course."

Bastion cocks his head. "That sounds like an Elysian name. Mount Celestia is not quite sure what to make of that people and their strange gods… but they have always fascinated me. But … it sounds like he’s overcome his past well enough to pick up a blade, and he’s devoted to you enough to abandon his paradise of a plane and march onto yours with your army…"

"His plane was less a paradise to him at that point, and more a straitjacket reminding him of what he was. In Elysium, they have… ideas about people with his proclivities, and so he opted to shed them and come with us. Celestin is in the company of Navanna Vladaam at present. She has… a somewhat more forceful personality than myself. I think she's helped him a great deal. And he has helped her in return."

"I imagine he’s yet another one of the tales you’ve collected and woven yourself into. I should like to hear about him, perhaps, sometime."

"If I don't get to tell you, you can ask him. It's a tale worth hearing. A botched rescue… a giant fucking dragon… flying horses…" Her eyes wander up to the glittering expanse of the starry sky overhead. "Oh! I actually didn't finish Nebulosa's story! The whole reason I wanted to tell you this story under the stars was for this part! Shall I go on?"

Bastion brightens a little, standing once more. "Please do!"

She settles herself against the bannister and clears her throat. "See… when Nebulosa's grove fell to Oinos's pull, the stars were taken from her. Her one source of joy and beauty and change in the bleakness of a Sunless Praemal. And so… with what little magic she had left after gathering pine cones, she would cast a spell that mimicked the night sky for a short time."

Bastion gave a sad nod. " It was worth it for her, I imagine, just to see them again, even if it consumed some of her power… " 

"She was doing this when we found her… just before she blew the fiends pursuing us back to whatever sulphurous pit they came from. So I showed her this." Laurel pulls a small shard of jet black stone from her pocket, painted with stars. 

Bastion squints at it. "Those stars … like the ones here!"

Laurel nods excitedly. "I found it on the body of one of the Drow, back in the time sink, along with a leaf preserved in some kind of resin and some pieces of petrified wood. They were in this box along like holy relics… their last memoirs of the surface they'd left behind."

"Wait … the body of one of the Drow -- you mean someone who had died in your past, about now, and whose body lay there undisturbed until your present?" 

"Yes. Inside the time sink."

Bastion is visibly impressed. "What a treasure for them. I carried something like that with me, in fact -- a stone from the Fourth Heaven, shimmering like mother-of-pearl. But I had to give it up -- as I fell under Danar’s corrupted influence, it began to burn me, terribly." He rubs the pads of his fingers together at the memory. "So in the end? I gave it to Parnaith. Now, if she has ascended as a Power, I wonder what became of it?"

Laurel's heart jumps at the thought of possibly finding it one day and returning it to his hands. Or perhaps carrying it for him as Parnaith once did. And she laughs inwardly at her own ridiculous sentimentality. Even in the face of her own death, she can't not help. Maybe… maybe she can get a message to Cayn to retrieve it. If they all make it out of here...

She gives her head a good shake and continues with her story. "I showed Nebulosa the chart. Let her have it while we journeyed, and she'd still replicate it from time to time. But when she saw the real stars of Praemal again…" Laurel places her hands over her heart and gives a slow spin. "I've never seen joy like that. She didn't care that it was cold enough to freeze the hair off a yak or that there were undead everywhere. She had her stars back. For real this time. And hopefully… we'll be able to get them back for good. Along with her trees. I mean… we have a start for that grove anyway. Warmth-Comes-Again was kicking the living shit out of Cryonax and his goons when we headed for the Spire."

"She’d waited for ten thousand years… which is even longer for one of your kind, even a ghost, than someone like me!" He smiles, actually showing his teeth. "It sounds like your little owl, whatever magic she may have, gets most of her strength from a simple refusal to give up."

"I'm pretty sure she's made entirely out of feathers and spite and hellfire."

Bastion actually laughs at the joke; a strange, alien sound that cracks at the edges. "She must have collected some during her long incarceration, I suppose…"

"I believe it. You should see her fight. She's a vicious little thing. There's a line from a famous playwright. ‘Though she be but little she is fierce?’ That's Nebulosa."

"There are almost no druids on the Outer Planes, you know… only a few in the Beastlands." Bastion gazes up at the stars again, their light reflecting in his eyes. "But the ones who used to live on this world… they’re impressive. They get their power not from the details of the Weave, or sheer force of will, or the Powers … but out of the essence of this world itself and its history. 

Laurel looks off down to where the Temple of Jode will eventually be. Where her friends will eventually be fighting a desperate battle against Cryonax. "They aren't going to hold out though. Not without help. We didn't exactly come prepared to deal with an Elemental Prince. Definitely not anywhere near something we were planning on facing." She turns to face him, placing her hand on his shoulder. "I feel l have no right to ask this of you and yet I have no choice. I need you to survive this, Bastion. Whatever's happening to you. Whatever the Book is doing to you. You have to find a way to hold out. I can get you out of here, but I need you at that fight. We won't be able to fix what Danar's done without your help."

Bastion gives a stiff nod. "This I promise you, Laurel… you’ve given me hope for a future beyond this spire of spiritual pestilence, and your visit today was worth the five hundred year wait. I waited here for you on this height for five hundred years; I’ll wait for you in this castle for nine thousand more, and then with whatever strength I have left, I’ll come to the aid of you and yours."

Bastion kneels a third time, not without a considerable and obvious amount of pain. His head now on a level with Laurel's, bowed further as he takes one of her hands -- hers, she realizes, not Fiona’s, although she wonders if he can tell the difference. He slowly bends forward and brushes the back of her hand gently with his lips, not so much as a kiss as a salutation and a benediction. 

"I have no right to ask this of you," she repeats as she busies herself with arranging her cloak more evenly around his shoulders. Anything to keep from thinking about what she's asking and how horribly unfair it is. "You… you could leave. You could. I know what planetars, even fallen ones, are capable of. Even thousands of years from now you have enough power to get out of here. But here I am asking you to hold out and stay to save my people."

Bastion looks up at her, shaking his head slowly. "I could leave, perhaps. Flee this planet, flee back to the Planes. But then what would I be? A fallen angel doubly bereft, once of my sanctity, and then again of my very self, severed from any sense of direction or identity since Danar’s corruption and fall brought my mission on Praemal crashing down. You alone have offered me a gift beyond any of the glory of Celestia, whose light began to dim in my eyes even before I left -- the gift of purpose. I will repay it with a vigil lasting until the turning of the sky brings an entirely new set of stars over my head, and then I will give my last strength for your people."

Laurel frowns in confusion but Bastion points to the star chart, and then to the sky… noting that the celestial pole labeled by the Drow is not quite where it is in the sky. "Look there -- and at the sky." he says, and Laurel's gaze follows the direction of his finger. "The drow should be here in … two hundred years or so!"

"Oh… only two hundred years." she laughs, but even her sarcasm and bravado can't dam the tears that start to fall from her eyes. "I got the easy way out." She sniffles, wiping angrily at her own face. "All I have to do is die. I even get a few hours to do it too and it doesn't even hurt because I can't feel it. It's not fair."

Bastion squeezes her hand where he's still holding it. Laurel can sense the power in his grip, even though he's only using the barest fraction of it to comfort her. The fact that something like this has bent even part of its will to hers is freshly harrowing.

"You have given me your one mortal life … and given me the hope for a future beyond this." Bastion says, unaware of the thoughts and doubts swirling in her mind. "Neither of those is easy. So, Laurel Weaver-Of-Tales, I give you but ten thousand years of my soul’s long journey -- the last ten thousand, but they are yours. And during this vigil I will remember you, and remember these stars, and think of your poor owl, alone in her dead tree, carefully hoarding her power to sweep up the seeds of the future she dreamed of -- lamenting every incinerated hezrou only because it cost her the power to save one more pine cone.

"But she made it. And I? Celestials are not made for that sort of endurance. But I will give you what I have."

Laurel barely suppresses a tremor that passes the length of her body at these words. She lays her hand carefully over the top of Bastion's head. "Please be careful, Bastion." Her voice quakes as she says these words. "And seek shelter and succor where you can find it. I fear… I fear much, actually. But most acutely, for your sake, I fear the Book's power. Its corruption will spread and I am afraid of it."

"There is nowhere in this castle that is safe from it… not for that length of time." He looks up at her, Laurel's hand sliding along his jaw. "But you mentioned Parnaith’s chamber as a sanctuary? Even it will fall, eventually."

"Surely there's a way to stall it… at least keep it safe long enough to… I don't know. I'm so far out of my depth I'm not even sure which way to swim anymore."

Bastion's eyes turn cunning for a moment prompting Laurel to lean in. "I have an idea." he tells her, his golden eyes still slightly unfocused as he thinks. "These accursed plates were Danar’s creation, designed to keep me safe in battle -- and to absorb corruption and evil, so I could handle banes without being burned. Of course, the Book knew that they would over time become corrupted themselves, and then deliver that into my bones where they are screwed in. This is, among many things, the reason I am becoming a twisted mockery of the planetars of Heaven. But … if I …"

Here he looks around, as though he is afraid of being watched or overheard by the Book, and then steels himself and says, “... if I were to take refuge there, and use their power of absorbing evil … maybe I could keep that chamber, itself, pure? It would no doubt take a toll on me… but the fiends that the Book creates could at least not enter, nor could the worst of the corruption.”

"And then, you'd be able to still hide there." Laurel turns the idea over in her head. "That sounds… like something resembling a plan. If a desperate one… I'm familiar with those." 

"I tried to go in there once before… but the purity of the place, combined with the corruption that had collected in my armor, kept me out. That is no place for a fallen angel. But … perhaps, with this new purpose, I shall try again."

Laurel nods. It's not much of a plan, but it's a plan. "Please be careful, Bastion… I'm sure the Book won't be thwarted so easily."

"I don’t have to thwart it." Bastion replies, a sliver of confidence works its way into his voice. "I just have to wait for … which of those is your Pole Star, hm?" He looks up at the sky, slightly west of south, waiting for Laurel's reply.

Her face scrunches up in thought. "Um… I'm no astronomer, but I did once get to Valinor by starlight. Remind me to tell you that story too sometime. It's… um…" she squints around at the horizon. "That one? I think? Yes, that one."

His eyes follow her pointing finger. "Then… eight and a half thousand years to go, I think." He points to the Pole Star in his time, which he knows from watching them in his long vigil, and then to the drow star chart -- it’s moved slightly between his time and the drow’s. "At least … well, I’ve gotten quite well acquainted with them during this long vigil waiting for you, only to find that it’s just the first step." 

Laurel expels a long breath. "I'm so sorry, Bastion. I wish I had a way to make this easier. Stories only do so much, I've learned."

"Easier?" He arches an eyebrow. "My failings led to this, not yours. But ease is not the greatest gift you could give me -- hope is, and you’ve already given me that. Even the highest glories of the Seven Heavens don’t hold a candle to your brief visits in amongst my vigil here.

"And I am not exaggerating. For all its splendor? Heaven is sterile. Complete. Unchanging. The celestials think it is perfect -- so why try to make it better? The mortal world … transcends that."

Laurel is quiet for a long while, listening to his words and memorizing that Pole Star where it hangs in the sky. It's no longer fixed at a point in space, but somewhere behind her eyes. Fixed where it stood when she told Bastion about Nebulosa's stars.

"Take me there," she says, her tone suddenly reckless and perhaps even a little obstinate, given the fate she knows is in store for her. "Eventually. One day. Whether you find me a petitioner or if somehow I survive this whole mess I've wrought. Take me there."

"To Mount Celestia?"

"Yes." she says with a single tight nod before she turns her star-tinged gaze up to his face. "I want to see it. I've literally been to the dark depths of the end of the universe no fewer than three times. And three is enough. That's the rule, I think. But I've never seen any one of the Seven Heavens, or however many there are supposed to be." 

"Mount Celestia isn’t … well, it’s not a warm place. I promise that if we both somehow make it out of here, if I survive, if you survive," He wipes a stray drop of blood off her face with a single fingertip. "I’ll tell you the tales of my home, and if I can, I’ll take you there. Yes -- there are Seven. But the last goes on forever, so it is said. I have only been as far up the Mount as the Fifth."

Laurel follows the motion of his stained hand. "Ugh… it's getting everywhere isn't it?"

"Yes. And I again am in awe that you would sacrifice it all for me."

She elbows him gently. "Worth it. I made you smile again tonight… today… toni-today? No tonight… Whatever time it is. This," she gestures to the desolate surrounds. "Sucks, for the record. I know the Heavens have their whole… unending cascades of light and flowery bullshit, but at the end of everything? No matter which end you decide to go pitch yourself off of? It's all dark and samey. So… y'know. The middle is where it's at. For the record."

Bastion frowns at the allusion. "There are no flowers in Heaven, actually." he says rather seriously. "Plants bloom so they can make more of themselves. But why would Heaven need that? Actually, there aren’t even any plants, as you would understand them. No -- it’s far more sterile than that."

Laurel gives him a long series of unimpressed blinks. "Dude, even the Grey Waste has trees. Granted… the trees bleed. So y'know… there's that. But they at least have trees. How do you not go crazy there?"

Bastion gives her words a moment's consideration. "You would probably say that they have, at least a little. Remember that my kind are the angels sent out into the world of mortals; there are those of us even more pure than I was.

"But … Laurel, I am coming to agree. The middle -- your realm -- is where it’s at, whether you are after power, or comfort, or pleasure, or even a better world. After all… what sort of power brought you here, hm?

She shrugs. "I honestly don't know… A mix I suppose. A little of me and a little of Ilmater and a little of Rassilon probably…

Bastion points to her neck. "Blood. Well -- blood and music. Heaven is bloodless. And… there is music, of a sort, in Mount Celestia… but not harmony. The angels do not sing. Heaven is bloodless… but you are not."

Laurel smirks inwardly at the idea that the Angels don't sing. She's clearly and unabashedly entertaining some sort of mischief probably involving harmony points, all the weird crystals that make up the higher reaches of Celestia, and generally ruffling lots and lots of feathers. But she can't keep the smile from flowering on her face at the image of the havoc she would love to cause.

Bastion stands creakily to his feet again, adamantine scraping audibly. Laurel pretends the sound is metal on metal and not metal on bone. "It seems I can occasionally make you smile too, then…"

"Oh you always do. You always did!" she says with bright sincerity. "You were my favorite story to chase down… I'm glad that I did."

Bastion takes one last look at the stars, then turns to Laurel, resting a hand on lightly on her bloodied shoulder. “Thank you again, Laurel. I will keep vigil for you in Parnaith’s room, and wait until the mists clear once again.” He leans forward and brushes her hair with a finger, and Laurel unconsciously follows the motion. Then he slowly walks back toward the stairs that led up to the parapet where Laurel found him. As he moves past, the air around her dissolves into fog once more.

The haze is even darker than before. No smudges of brightness. Just coils upon coils of black on black. Strange sounds and faces coil in and out of the inky darkness. And for the first time during one of these transitions, Laurel has a profound sense of wrongness as she comes out on the other side. The non-threatening but clouded presence is gone, and Laurel begins to feel afraid in its absence. And just a little bit queasy.

Her vision clears very slowly this time. Unlike previous jumps in time, she can hear things before she can see anything: the shrill, rough sound of metal crushing and grinding against metal, and a high-pitched keening noise, multiple pitches at once, that seems to be coming from all around her. Then as the fog finally dissipates, she… sees nothing. Complete and utter darkness surrounds her.

Laurel is incredibly confused. This is the first time that she's materialized but not immediately seen Bastion or found him within arm's reach. But … by the logic of how the spell has been working so far, clearly Bastion is here. She inhales deeply and reminds herself of this as she listens more closely. She hears heavy, flabby breaths, coming clearly from something huge, and the whining sounds intensify every time she hears the clang of metal on metal.

"Bastion?" she cannot keep her voice from shaking. Something about that keening sound threatens to make her wretch. "Where are we? I can't see..."

Her eyes slowly adapt to the pitch-black darkness here. The green-and-violet speckling in her vision dies down… but still she can see nothing at all. Sound is the only sense she's granted. 

Clang… clang… clang… and then finally a flicker of light! 

A flash, a spark for just an instant… and then darkness, again. And that unearthly wailing sound, continues making her want to clamp her hands over her ears and run. Whatever is making that awful sound, it was never intended to do so.

She swallows twice and takes another deep, forceful breath, gaining a firmer grip on herself. Bastion is here. Somewhere in this darkness and she needs to find him. Maybe he's in the next room… maybe… but Laurel finds herself walking towards the sound and where she saw the spark, hand outstretched in the darkness. 

"Bastion?" she calls out again, her voice blessedly a little stronger this time. "Bastion, where are you?"

She feels … warmth? And … corruption? The air smells metallic and foul which does nothing to settle her roiling stomach. She realizes she might be near him, finally accepting the fact that he is in fact in this horror show with her. Maybe watching… maybe next in line for whatever is happening… but then why doesn't he answer her?

Then, a dull red light fills the room, coming from behind a great hulking figure. It flickers, casting long shifting shadows all around the room. Some shape with jagged wings, ten feet tall, is standing silhouetted by the light -- obviously a fiend. Laurel wracks her brain to recognize it. 

A pit fiend? No, they don’t have wings. 

A balor? No, they don’t have wings seemingly made of metal plates rather than flame. 

But it's familiar… like a nightmarish sense of deja vu. Laurel focuses further and realizes that the shifting red light comes from something glowing in the fiend’s hands, though it faces away so that she cannot see what it's doing.

And then, by the reddish light flickering around the room, she finally sees him… Bastion. He’s lying on top of a stone dais of some sort, stretched out on his back. His wings, or what remains of them, are crumpled under his shoulders; his arms are transfixed to the stone beneath him. Whether he’s shackled, tied, or worse, she can’t tell in the shifting gloom. His head is forced backwards, pinned flat against the stone.

But … she can see his eyes. One golden eye, glinting in twice-reflected light, casting wildly around the room, thinking he heard something… 

His mouth is open. His chest is heaving and every compression of his ribs intensifies the terrible sound ringing in Laurel's ears.

It's him making that awful wailing, she realizes.

"Bastion!" Laurel cries, breaking into a full sprint towards him with arms outstretched to try and pull him off the table and get him to safety. But when she reaches him, her hands fall uselessly through his face, even as both are obscured from view as the light fades to a dull glow too feeble to illuminate anything on that side of the room. 

Laurel stumbles backwards a step, a fresh wave of hot nausea washing over her at this next revelation. She is now too far away in time to touch him.

… but … she thinks he heard her, or at least felt her. His eyes had turned in her direction in desperation and horror, and she thinks she could see him mouthing words through his suffering.

“I still hold my vigil…”

Laurel's breath begins to come in panicked labored pants. Whatever they’re doing to him, it’s not good. And it goes beyond simple physical agony. "Shit… shit… no no no… Bastion? BASTION? Can you hear me?" Her voice is rising uncontrollably in pitch as the terror sets in. She can't touch him. She can't cast any spells that would help. They would only shorten her already pitifully brief life, and she might need to help him again later. She can't even see him right now. And she doesn't know if he can hear her. "Bastion…" she begs, her voice fracturing around the edges of his name. "Bastion, please answer me. Please?"

Bastion is still mouthing words in the darkness, his voice barely more than a grackled scrape. “They’re determined to make me one of them… I still hold my vigil… I still hold my vigil… I… I still...” he breaks off into more of the discordant moaning.

Laurel swallows hard to steady her voice. He can hear her. She's almost certain he was answering her. "Bastion? Answer me, heart of mine. It's Laurel! Ba-?"

All of a sudden, something flares into brilliant white light, accompanied by a sharp crack and a hissing sizzle. Whatever the light source is, it's still shadowed by the fiend on the other side of the room, but this grants enough light to take in the horrific scene in full. 

Bastion is not shacked to the dais -- he’s staked to it, with metal rods running through joints in his armor, through his arms and legs, and into the stone. A glinting silvery cable runs loosely around his neck, though it's holding his head flush to the platform. There are, in various places in Bastion’s armor, holes with hollow spikes wedged in them. It almost looks as though someone has somehow punctured the solid adamantine plates, and left hollow nails sticking in the holes. 

A wordless, despairing sound claws its way unbidden up Laurel's throat as she tears her eyes away from Bastion to look at her surroundings. She has to come up with a plan and fast. Where is she?

This is … very clearly, a torture-room -- or a surgery theatre. Or some nauseating combination of the two. The fiend at the other end looks something like a balor, but … she only thinks so because of the horns. Otherwise, it’s an amalgam of metal plating and shadow, with projections that only look like wings sticking out of the sides of its body, the Book’s designs mocking even the shapes of the fiends they’re formed from. And she does suspect the Book. The balor-thing is wreathed in the same purplish corruption that Laurel has spent every moment she's with Bastion chasing off his armor. The fiend, illuminated still by the light spilling around from him, stands before what looks like a laboratory table, full of jars and vats and distilling equipment.

Laurel stares at the balor for a long second, memorizing everything about it. Every plate in its armor. Every curve of its horns. Every tooth. Every scale. She feels a liquid, searing rage bubbling up in her gut, threatening to cloud her vision to red. But it feels good. She feels less helpless when she's angry. More clear headed. More tactical. She's going to have Kalessin rip this thing apart one piece at a time and its head is going back to Bastion, she decides with a cold detachment. That is a thing that will happen.

And with the fiend marked for certain and painful death, she turns back to Bastion. Rescue first. Vengeance later. She reaches for one of the spikes to try and pull it free but her hands pass through it again, and she lets out a shaky frustrated breath. Laurel frantically scrubs her hands over her face, further smearing the blood that's pouring down her front in great gouts, before she tries again to get Bastion's attention.

"Bastion, can you hear me? Bastion, look at me!" She moves to lean over his face, to force herself into his field of vision.

Bastion’s eyes gradually focus closer, coming to rest on Laurel's face, but there's no recognition in his gaze. “Another phantom?" he hisses out, his ruined voice barely more than a whisper. "Another trick? You already have me, take your phantasms away, damn you…” His eyes begin to cloud again, as he starts to rave, spitting curses in Infernal as he pulls fruitlessly against his bonds.

Something deep inside of Laurel snaps at not being recognized. Her panic crystallizes into a resolve harder than even the adamantine of Bastion's armor. No. No this will not stand, she thinks. She climbs onto the dais on all fours and shouts at the top of her lungs mere inches from his face. "Bastion! You will answer me when I call you by name. You have promised your will to mine and no one else shall have it. Not while I still draw breath. And I do for a few moments and millennia yet. I command you to answer me when I call you. BASTION!"

Here she shouts his name, letting fly one of her sonic darts to ricochet off the resonant spaces in her skull. His name amplifies and rings off the close in marble walls and causing the fine glassware on the table to tinkle precariously. Her nose begins to bleed profusely, but Bastion's eyes clear completely and he finally focuses on her face.

"Laurel?" He croaks out, straining fruitlessly against the spikes when he recognizes her. "Is it really you?"

She begins to cry with relief, tears and blood running down her face. And she wipes at them desperately, only succeeding in smearing her cheeks further. "Yes… yes it's me." she whispers tenderly. "I'm here. What's happened to you, Bastion? How did you get here? I thought you went to Parnaith's room?"

He tries to nod but the restraints prevent any motion. "I … did… and stayed there, and defended it … for thousands of years…"

"Did they break in? What even is this creature?" She glances at the fiend letting the sight of it steel her with more actionable emotion. She couldn't give in to despair. Not now. Bastion could hear her and he needed her. Anger though? Anger she could work with. "I would shred him if I could get my hands on him."

“Some abomination …" Bastion manages cutting his eyes to where his captor is lurking. "Spawned by the Book, a mockery of a balor… they didn’t break in… they tricked me into coming out…”

The balor glances over at the angel strapped to his work table, listening to what he presumes to be maddened raving. The creatures smirks, it's scaly lips peeling back off its yellowed teeth, before it returns to its preparations.

Laurel casts a hopeless eye around at the restraints pinning Bastion to the stone. "You … you have to get out of this, Bastion. And I don't know if I can help you. I can't… I can't touch you anymore. We're too far apart. What… is there anything I can do? They're going to kill you!"

Bastion swallows thickly in an effort to regain the strength of his voice. "They’re not going to kill me. They want to … turn me into one of them, insane and devoted only to chaos and madness. Stay with me? If you can?" His voice cracks like fine porcelain around the desperate request. "And tell me another of your tales of endurance?"

Motion draws Laurel's eye as the fiend turns around. The white-hot glow radiates from the tip of a spike -- a luminous gemstone -- maybe diamond from the shape of the facets? He walks over to Bastion, and places the point against the armor plate above his left upper arm, carefully maneuvering it into a very precise position.

Laurel stares at the balor as it works obliviously. She visibly has to swallow back a great deal of livid, liquid, blistering hot anger as well as a not inconsequential amount of blood. She would kill it if she could. And she will. Bastion is hers. Not Danar's. Not Celestia's. Not even Parnaith's. Hers. And she doesn't tolerate violence to those in her fold. Fuck using Kalessin or Cayn. She will tear this thing asunder with her own two hands.

But that is not now. Now is comforting her friend. She can do this too, and it is of course the more worthy course of action. And the one more fitting of her station, she reminds herself. With renewed resolution, she returns her attention to Bastion, positioning herself so that he cannot watch what is happening to him.

"Let me tell you the story of my trip to the end of the multiverse. How does that sound?" She forces herself to smile, even though she's certain there's a good deal of blood in her teeth.

"There are many ends… and all of them better than here." he wheezes.

"I've seen three of them," she makes herself say. "And you are correct. Have you ever been to Pluton?"

"No … it is no place for celestials… but it is, still, better than here. You have been?"

A thin whirring sound splits the air, slowly morphing into a tinny, grinding whine. It's a drill, Laurel realizes without looking. The glowing bit of a diamond-tipped drill, heated to white hot incandescence. Bastion's arm twists involuntarily as the drill eats into the plate. But his eyes never leave Laurel's face. His jaw clenches but he doesn't make a sound, not wanting to interrupt.

Laurel lets out a slow, consolidating breath as she wills herself to focus. Story now. Balor-shredding later. "Yes. I have been. I've been all the way out to its farthest reaches. And I brought two things back with me."

"Yourself -- that’s the one that matters." He grinds out through clenched teeth. "But what else?"

She'd give her other hand if she could touch him right now, she thinks. But instead she says, "Three things, then. Listen to me and focus on my voice. And I will take you there and show you."

Bastion blinks once slowly, and takes a deep breath, as deep as the restrictions of the adamantine plates allow. The balor's drill continues to eat into Bastion's armor, but for now he's under the spell of her impending story, hanging on her every word.

"Imagine for me if you will, the edge of Pluton. The part that touches the upper reaches of the Grey Wastes." she begins, closing her own eyes as she calls up the memory in the richest detail she can manage." The bleeding trees of Niflheim thin out into a rolling expanse of sandy, brown hills that eventually flatten into a long floodplain. The light is plentiful enough. Like a cloudy day on Arborea or Elysium. But it's flat and featureless, filtered down through the hazy air from a parchment-yellow disc of light that can barely be called a sun. Stunted olive trees hardly bigger than shrubs, gnarled and twisted from deprivation, dot the landscape, standing over coarse and meager dry grass. There are a few animals; mostly nasty, piggish creatures that roam the open hills. And there are people here. Somehow. Even sparser than the olive trees are occasional shacks or lean-to's. And cut through it all is the brackish, grinding water of the Styx, now so saturated with memories and the essences of the lives that carry on above that it moves like tree sap in winter.

"The first shack we found was empty of everything save a moldy old pallet of straw and hide. On it lay a skeleton… its bones so dry they nearly crumbled to dust just from being touched. We thought at first these people were drawn here by despair… like Nebulosa and her petrified trees, but we eventually discovered that the people who lived here had always been here."

Laurel can hear the balor continuing to stomp about just out of the corner of her eye, glass alchemical equipment clinking in its massive claws as it continues to press the drill into Bastion's arm. She doesn't look. She can't look. And she can't let Bastion look either.

"There was a woman," She presses on, her voice taking on a serene, meditative timbre. "Living in a shack maybe a day and a half's walk from the first hut we found. She never gave us her name. I find myself wondering if she even bothered to have one. Her skin was paper-thin, stretched tight over her hunger-sharpened bones. Her hair was wispy and white. Barely enough to cover her scalp in anything more than a gauzy film. And her eyes were sunken deep in her face, and she peered up at us like a… like a prey animal staring out of its little hovel trying to decide if we were friend or foe. She wasn't old. But she was aged… if that makes sense.

"She had nothing. Barely enough olives and meat to keep herself alive, and a well that dredged up a small measure of brackish but drinkable water. But she offered help to us if we needed it. A place to rest, even if it was just a straw mat on the floor of her hut. And some olives. It was strange… she wasn't magnanimous about it. She wasn't… happy to have company, but she wasn't bothered or upset by it either. We were a matter of course. A change from the monotony to be sure and not… not a problem for her. But she didn't seem like she craved the change either. She simply took it in stride."

Bastion stares wide eyed up at Laurel, his eyes calming -- knowing that she's here, leading him into Pluton, a hell that’s twice-over more peaceful than the one he’s in now -- first, since nothing there is trying to murder him, and second -- since she was there, and it’s part of her tales now… just as he might be one day...

"I kept an olive pit." she says, fidgeting with the end of her braid for lack of anything better to do with her hands. "We grew it into a tree and awakened it like the others when we eventually got back to the other survivors from Praemal. Its name is End-Of-All. Ironic… a growing thing with such a name. That's the first thing that I brought back with me from Pluton. One of the woman's olives. Evidence of life… however dim… so far out on the edge of everything.

"Can you imagine living there? Can you send your senses to a place like that? With its dim, oily sunlight, and unchanging landscape. Sound doesn't carry well. Barely anything grows in the sandy soil bordering the Styx. No weather. Not even a breeze. Not really even anything to register as temperature. Just… the same. Always the same. Day in and day out. For this woman and who knows how many others there." 

A grim smile pulls at Laurel's mouth. "I vainly asked her why she didn't leave. Me in my foolishness and my desire to save everyone. I wanted to save her from this, but she blinked up at me and said, "And go where? Do what? This is all I've known." I learned a valuable lesson from her. Sometimes part of being given the responsibility of saving things is understanding what needs saving, I suppose."

Bastion’s teeth clench, and the pitch of the drill changes. He gasps and a faint, keening sound escapes from his throat. Laurel's voice falters as she's pretty sure the balor’s drill has punched through to his bone. But Bastion still looks unblinkingly and helplessly up at her, knowing that the image of Pluton is his lifeline to a world other than this one, a world where people go to hell and come back.

And so, Laurel swallows hard again and wipes the blood off her nose with the back of her clean hand.

"Can you smell what the air is like there, Bastion?" She asks. "Did you know that the air itself is salty? Have you traveled that far down the river? At this point the Styx has actually begun to crystallize and if you could stand to be close enough to its banks, the water literally makes a grating sound as the salt crystals slide over each other. It's such a strange place… so stimulating, with the brackish air and the bitter olives and the strange, filmy daylight with no shadows... but so much unchanging stillness, too.

"And yet it's not always the same. There is a decay into sameness as you travel further down along the River."

As she says this, Bastion visibly calms, his breathing becomes even and slow again, despite the trauma being inflicted on him. She sees a sense of familiarity in his eyes at this -- as if this is something of what his life has become. Until today… 

The balor walks away again, his footsteps hammering on the stone floor. Laurel is not sure what’s coming next because she can't force herself to look, but she knows it’s not good. The drill had only been part of the preparation. She can see a new hollow nail poking up where he'd been drilling.

"As we walked across the sandy terrain, the hills flattened." She goes on, distracting herself as much as Bastion. "The olive trees, already not terribly common, grew sparser and sparser, and smaller and smaller. The last one we saw was no taller than my calf. No fruit. No leaves. Just a twisted stick poking up out of the sand. Though my curiosity, as always, got the better of me. I scratched at the bark of one of its twigs and found it to still be alive. Its sap stained my fingernails black for months.

"We walked for what seemed like ages through that wasteland. Though I suppose that's not an accurate term. A wasteland implies that there was once life. There has never been life here, save what passes through or gets lost on its way somewhere. As we trudged forward, the sun slowly dipped lower and lower on the horizon, changing from a jaundiced yellow, to a strangely vivid orange, to a dull venous red, and lastly to an otherworldly violet… barely luminous above the hazy horizon.

Movement at the edges of Laurel's vision draws her attention for a brief second. The balor has returned with a flask of liquid swirling inky black and deep red -- the color the d’Angelines call sangoire, although certainly it means nothing so holy in this place. He inserts a metal funnel in the hole on the spike, and tips the flask into it. The fluid is viscous and oily, and drips only slowly. She adjusts her position, to be certain that her face is all Bastion can see.

"And then it disappeared entirely." she went on, returning her gaze to the fallen angel's face. "I have watched the sun die twice. In two different places.

"But just like before, we kept moving. The light grew dimmer and dimmer until we had to rely on magic to see. And of course… with no sun to keep time, we began to lose touch with how far we'd gone. How long we'd been gone. What we were even doing there?

"It's happening to me now." she gives a saturated cough of laughter as she wipes at her nose again. "I'm forgetting… I'm telling you a story, not just describing a place. I never told you why we were going to Pluton did I? To the edge of the universe? What would drive us to go there?"

Bastion wets his mouth. "Knowing you?" he croaks with the faintest flicker of a smile. "Something at the end needed sav-"

In the middle of the word, Bastion tenses and screams; thrashing and wrenching his other arm so hard that ichor drips between the armor plates to puddle onto the dais. He screams and screams wordlessly with his inhuman voice, many high wailing tones twisting into one another as they were never intended to. But keeps his eyes focused on Laurel's face, straining towards her all the while.

Laurel thinks that if she hadn't already killed herself, this sound would have slain her where she stood. Dead in an instant from a heart rent in two. But somehow… some part of her doesn't panic. Even though all she wants to do is clamp her hands over her ears and join the cacophony until she's hoarse and screaming up blood. Some distant part of her remains separate from the torment she's witnessing. The part of her that's telling this story. The part that will rip this balor limb from limb once she’s done.

"Easy… easy… you're right." She hears herself say with a calm, serene voice that doesn't seem to be entirely her own. It's even and gentle and somehow penetrates through the supernatural sound of Bastion's wailing scream. "You're right. Finish the sentence, Bastion. Tell me what I was doing." 

Bastion grits his teeth, biting off the piercing shriek with an audible click as he fixes his gaze squarely somewhere behind Laurel's eyes. The thousand-yard-stare from five inches away. He's still strung tighter than a piano wire, but he's hers. He's still focused on her story. And she had asked him a question. “Something at the end needed saving?” He manages to grind the words out.

Laurel nods forcing a smile to her lips. He needs it. "Yes. Yes, that's it." she praises. "I was going to the end of the Styx because I needed to destroy the Black Grail. Someone I'd come to care about very much was trapped inside. Navanna. Her brother had used the Grail to capture her soul and usurp her body back on Praemal. We brought her with us all the way from Ptolus to Bytopia where she was convalescing but not getting any better. I was destroying it to free her. One woman. Just one. But it was worth the journey. Much like my journey to you has been."

Bastion continues to stare fixedly at her, all of his effort going into staying focused on her tale.

"For a long long stretch, we saw nothing. Heard nothing other than the grinding of the Styx as it flowed alongside our plodding path." She goes on, her voice falling back into the soft, monotonous tone she'd been using before. "We did our best to fight the oppression of the tedium brought on by the endless sameness. We taught each other bits of languages. Sang songs. Played word games. We told stories." Here Bastion's eyes flicker with a sort of nameless recognition. "Anything to break up the monotony. But we eventually ran out of words. We ran out of everything. In our minds anyway. We had enough food to see us through for awhile yet… but that wasn't going to be the problem, it seemed.

"But then… then something very strange happened. Even as the landscape became more and more homogenous… the sand was completely uniform in texture. The sky was a perfectly unchanging and unmarked matte black, barely distinguishable at the horizon. The river no more than a flat trail of ink off to our right… just barely in view. But just before the last of the natural light faded, we discovered something amazing.

Out of the corner of her eye, Laurel notices that the balor is looking at Bastion with a rather baffled expression, clearly wondering what is going on inside his head. He leans over the funnel to make sure it’s working properly and gives it a shake for good measure. Laurel's gaze goes flinty and determined watching this as she saps some strength from her personal plot to destroy the creature. The image in her head is of herself with a pry bar this time. Pulling the abomination apart one plate at a time. It would take her awhile, but it would be a labor of love. Or something like it.

"Did you know there are things that live at the edge of the universe, Bastion?" She continues with her tale. "Have you ever heard tales of the Living Cairns?"

Bastion shakes his head “no,” the movement almost imperceptible under the restraints.

"Neither had I before we ventured here. But we found them! Giant living stones perched at the edge of the Styx, which by this point was little more than a sludgy salt flat. They stood… taller than you! The largest were some twenty feet tall made of a kind of opaque crystal… smooth and warm to the touch."

Out of the corner of her eye, Laurel sees the light on the tip of the balor’s drill go out. But somehow, she can still see Bastion’s eyes -- no more than those, as if somehow the story has kindled some long dormant light within. By this light, she can see that her blood’s begun to drip down onto him, and she quickly realizes to her confusion and shock that this seems to be the only part of her that’s still corporeal. His armor is still covered in the tiny tendrils of growing corruption, thicker and longer than she'd seen before. But, where her blood falls on them, it seems to erode away. Laurel, noting this, takes a deep breath and repositions herself so that her hands are on either side of his chest, and her blood pours down directly across his chest and shoulders.

"Stay with me, Bastion." Laurel says as she adjusts. "Don't look anywhere but my face. I'm going to tell you about the Cairns."

His amber-amethyst eyes dutifully lock onto her face, and he doesn't so much as blink as he waits for her to continue the story.

"They're giant." she tells him, her voice breathless with a sort of manufactured excitement. "As big as houses! But that's not the most amazing thing. Do you know what they're doing way out there at the edge of everything? They're eating the memories that flow down the Styx. All the distilled experiences and thoughts that come down from the upper planes, they're the last thing with any difference in this part of the multiverse. The subtle differences in all the experiences of every sentient creature. The slight difference in pitch of sword striking bone. The variances in the smell of rain. One lover's kiss compared to another. The Cairns feed on all of these."

She can hear the balor walking around behind them with heavy footsteps, and with a soft “clink” he’s inserted another funnel into the tube connected to Bastion’s other arm. But Bastion doesn't react to this. He doesn't even seem to be aware of the balor at all. His attention is focused raptly on Laurel's words.

"And the best part?" She smiles even though she doesn't feel like it. She smiles because this is exciting. It's the most exciting part of the story. Her favorite part. "They can talk! They can talk, Bastion! And tell stories of their own. Out there in the middle of nothing! Nowhere! There are these giant talking rocks with ponderous, booming voices. And they, unlike the people that live in the upper part of that plane, are thrilled for the company. I talked to one for... I don't know how long. Hours? Must've been. I would have stayed forever and heard all the stories it had to tell, no matter how slowly it told them. And I would have told it so many tales in return… and I did at least give it a few.

"But we had to press on. We were not at the end yet. Eventually even the Cairns disappeared again and we were left walking in nothing. It grew darker. Our magic was giving out. Everything was giving out in truth. 

"And then suddenly, seemingly all at once, the ground grew soft beneath our boots, and we realized we'd reached the edge. As far as we could go without walking out and sinking into the muddy slurry made by the Styx emptying into the end of everything."

Laurel hears a soft dripping noise coming from where the balor is bent working over Bastion's arm. And the sound is followed by a sensation of numbing coldness emanating from this other tube. She's not sure what's in it, but Laurel knows it's not the red pain-inducing substance from earlier. If she had to hazard a guess, she thinks that the balor is trying to do something to corrupt Bastion's mind…

"So I did what I went there to do." She presses on, renewing her focus on Bastion in an effort to keep his on her. "I threw the Grail with all my strength out into the briny mud and it sank out of sight. And it was done."

“And what was on the other side of that empty void beyond all reason?” Bastion asks, his voice coming unstrung with effort and agony.

Laurel shakes her head slowly. "I don't know, Bastion. I didn't go any farther. I remember despairing at one point in our travels. I remember thinking… I've been entrusted to carry all these stories. All these lessons, and last times, and forgotten tales. And I'm just carrying them off into nothing. I'm not going to come back from this. It was a waste. It was a waste to give me these things. The Hand. And the couatl feather. And all the tales I've gathered. The lost gods I speak for. I'm just going to carry them off the edge of the world. And that will be that.

"But when I was standing there staring off into the dark... realizing I had finished my quest and that I was actually going to go back, I felt unaccountably silly for ever thinking that. And so as a reminder, I scooped up a palmful of dirt, and stuffed it into a potion bottle. I figured that if I wasn't going to carry my stories off the end of existence, I would carry the end of existence with me. Another story in and of itself."

Bastion’s breathing gradually slows -- he’s still very clearly and very visibly in pain, but managing it. But Laurel still feels wary. She's not sure what’s going to happen with whatever that hideous creature put into his other arm.

"And then we came home." she continued. "Someone appeared to us… I don't know from where. She helped us get home with her magic, which clearly came from some source besides the Weave. The Weave was dead that far out… Kalessin was nearly driven mad by it. And when we got back to our little band of survivors? The first thing I did, even before I took a bath, was sprint to Navanna's room. And she actually smiled at me when I came through her door. She vaguely recognized me and smiled. And that was the start of the new beginning for her."

A sharp hissing sound begins to slowly crescendo, coming from his other arm. Laurel can see the fiend smile, lips peeling back to reveal rank on rank of disgusting yellow teeth as whatever tincture he's poured into the angel begins to take hold. 

Bastion's eyes begin to lose focus again and he starts whispering to himself: “No… no… not like this… kill me instead… I don’t want to read… Laurel… I can’t keep your vigil…”

All the air leaves Laurel's lungs in a rush, the calm of the story completely evaporated. "Bastion… focus on my voice… can you still hear me?"

"Yes … for now…" His throat convulses around the words. "They have infused me with the corruption of the Book in liquid form, trying to make me like them…”

The freezing panic Laurel had managed to buck long enough to tell her story crashes down onto her again. "Bastion, we have to get you out of here… Pain I can get you through. This though?" She looks around at Bastion's restraints again. "What's holding you here?"

"This mithril garrote around my neck prevents spellcasting… and the spikes through my arms and my armor transfix them to this dais. The dais is infused with a spell that magnifies the gravity of everything on it"

"Are the spikes magical?"

"I… I don't know."

Laurel's thoughts gallop into action as she thinks of everything she has to hand. She thinks… and thinks… and tries not to get distracted with ideas about vengeance because she knows she just needs to get him out of here. 

She looks down at his armor, her blood beginning to coat it in a thin crimson sheen. It's apparently the only real way she can touch him now. She hopelessly drags a finger through it, and she's surprised to find that it reacts to her touch, following the trail of her finger like paint.

She can’t touch him. But her blood can... 

She looks at her clean hands and then at Bastion, the gears in her head turning at frantic speed for a single frozen moment before she realizes what she has to do.

Laurel raises Fiona's hand to her neck and slicks it with her blood, rubbing it over the other in a quick motion before she slides her stained fingers along Bastion's throat and flicks the chain off his neck. Ruddy stains mar his skin where she touches him. And for good measure she casts a spell -- an echoing wave of healing, enhanced with St. Fiona's power.

The spell fires off through the millennia with a blinding crackle of energy. And… Laurel notices something else, too. Her blood isn’t quite tangible, and quickly soaks into Bastion's skin. Somewhere around his left shoulder, there is another bright flare of light -- it’s almost as though the blood dripped onto him is contesting with the corruption spreading down his arm toward his heart. The balor whips around, wondering what the light is and as he does the healing effect goes off again. One of the tubes, the one in Bastion's right arm, the one with the liquid pain in it, twitches.

Laurel lets out a startled cough of laughter and slicks her hands again. She presses Bastion's face between her palms, casting haste and stacking the Hand of Fiona's effect onto it again. Then, grinning like a mad woman, she licks her lips, gathering the blood still pouring from her nose and places a kiss on his forehead, before whispering in his ear.

"Use your magic. I'll give you what you need to access it until you free yourself from these spikes. Come on. Get up, Bastion!"

Something ignites in Bastion's gaze when he realizes he's free. Laurel turns and looks at the balor, crouched at the angel's side on all fours with a bloodstained smile cutting across her face as she waits for Bastion to find the strands of the Weave and pull. She hears him whisper the words for a spell and she recognizes them as the beginning of an old favorite. Or rather, one of Jevicca's favorites.

Telekinesis.

Laurel's feral grin widens, and she nearly laughs again as she pours out the harmonized power to allow him to cast the spell, and cast it stronger. Bigger. More. And for good measure she invokes a copy for herself. 

Her help seems to have shaken something loose in Bastion. Power floods him, as does a wild, reckless fury that makes Laurel's anger at the balor seem like a halfling child throwing a tantrum. For the first time since their acquaintance, Bastion speaks pure, unaccented Celestial, casting the spell as Laurel's blood fountains over him covering him from the chest up, glowing where it contacts the corruption spreading up his shoulder. 

The tube and funnel fly out of his arm and the spikes are flung into the walls, sinking nearly six inches deep into the marble. The tubes strike the balor in the face like a stone from a sling. The remaining liquid pain covers him -- getting in his eyes, and his mouth -- and he reels back, clutching at his face.

That was only the copy, Laurel realizes. Her copy. The empowered original spell Bastion targeted on himself. He uses it to propel himself off of the stone slab with a tremendous push -- his muscles were weakened by the torments he’d endured, but magic is magic, especially magic aided from the future. He slams into the wall on the far side of the room with a deafening crash sending torture implements flying everywhere.

And … all of the blood spilled onto Bastion is absorbed into him in a flash. He looks different suddenly. His skin is covered over by a sheen of emerald, a shadow of proper wings flexing powerfully behind him. To Laurel's eyes he suddenly looks like the planetars she'd seen in books. Mighty and holy and ready to bash something's face in. 

And the balor, stunned as it is from being covered in liquid pain and corruption, is a perfect target for his newly ignited wrath.

Bastion fires off spells in quick succession to augment his own strength and size, wreathing himself in brilliant white light that makes stars dance across Laurel's dark-acclimated vision and growing to twice Laurel’s height. But she can't resist joining the party. She stands on the dais, planting her feet and pouring her own crackling energy into the newly freed angel, ringing him in a shield made of lightning.

Laurel hadn't ever seen Bastion like this. She's seen other angels like this, bedecked in holy radiance, somehow seeming larger than life. Bastion had always seemed stunted, and still. But he was not now. He was a vision of righteous fury. And the sight made her hungry for vengeance -- the vengeance that had roiled and seethed under the surface as she had been forced to watch that hellspawn torture Bastion.

But the tables had now turned.

Laurel catches Bastion's gleaming eye, and she sees her thirst for violence echoed there before she can even think to school it. And suddenly, her shame and self-discipline is gone. Just as the faltering, twisted, downcast Bastion is gone, replaced by an echo of what he must have been when he was newly arrived on Praemal. The Bastion who could not stand the idleness of Heaven and sought action. If Cayn’s determination and Kalessin’s ferocity in their long adventures together gave her only a dim glimpse of the resolve of a Celestial crusader set for battle, now she was seeing the original, up close. That Bastion of old grins out at her with even teeth and shining eyes... and she finds herself unaccountably greedy for it.

The things that she could do with him… 

The things that she would do with him right now… 

She leans over, pressing her blood-stained lips against his ear.

"Kill him for me, Bastion." she whispers sweetly. "Do it so I don't have to later."

Bastion's smile is positively savage. Gleeful. And grateful. A flick of his wings sends him hurtling towards the still-swaying balor who meets him halfway with a wide clumsy swing of its plated fist. The energy from Laurel's retributive ward crackles outward in a concussive blast, shattering all the delicate glass equipment in the room.

"I do not end this way!" Bastion shouts, his words ringing like great cathedral bells in Laurel's ears. “Die!”

As the angel swings, his muscles stand out sharp under his skin. One, two, three strikes, all bouncing somewhat off the balor's adamantine plating. But Laurel has an answer for that. She stretches out through herself… through her own body, draining her own failing bones and blood for access to the Weave. She pulls for divine power and pours it into Bastion, causing his fists to glow a brilliant white. Her vision clouds slightly, and for a moment she thinks she might faint, but she merely sways as she replants her feet.

Not yet, she thinks.

Bastion swings again, five blows this time in rapid succession with his bare fists, the strikes sparking white where they land on the patchwork of plates covering the fiend’s body. But the balor has regained its footing and fights back with his blows from his own spiked gauntlets, striking Bastion twice in the face and once in the chest and driving him halfway back onto the dais.

Bastion roars wordlessly as he skids back across the stone floor, but he rallies quickly. He launches himself at the balor again, giving no thought to defense, tangling his limbs around the thrashing creature. The balor tries to break free, repeatedly pounding on Bastion's ribs with a free hand but to no avail. Bastion's bigger. Stronger. And utterly livid.

Bastion slams him up against the wall with an echoing thud. The balor snarls with rage, black and red flames pouring out around him in a fiendish aura. But Bastion isn't deterred, even as his flesh begins to smoke from the heat. He punches him bare handed again and again, square in the faceplate of his adamantine helmet. But adamantine is nearly impossible to break, and while the creature’s head rocks from the force of the blows, its armor shows not even a dent.

And the balor is still struggling, still trying to break free. And while there's not much Laurel can do to help in the melee itself, she decides to further stack the odds in Bastion's favor, if only to be vindictive. A pair of rays, one black and one crimson, arc out of her fingers as she spits out both spells and a bright red spray of blood. The rays strike the pinned creature, causing it to shrink and sag in Bastion's grip as their draining magic courses over him.

And Bastion doesn't let up. He pins the balor to the wall and strikes the balor's helmet again and again. Whatever he is now, however far he has fallen -- he is still an angel, built from sterner stuff than mortal flesh. And his wrath is a conduit for his birthright; even if the light and sanctity of his homeland have long ago left him, the raw power of the High Heavens remains. He pounds the thing’s faceplate with a fist, each impact landing with a dozen times the force of a smith’s hammer. Even from thousands of years away, Laurel’s ears ring from the concussions. After a half-dozen blows, Laurel sees the front of its helmet begin to glow cherry-red, then a dull orange, then yellow, until the room is lit by the incandescence of it. Each blow heats the plate a little more, and each blow deepens a growing dent in the front, as even adamantine can be worked in enough heat.

As she watches this, Laurel marks that Bastion's fist is mangled… more than one of the fingers on his right hand hang twisted and limp, the bones shattered.

The balor tries feebly to kick Bastion off, but to no avail. He's weakened and stunned beyond any serious play at freedom. And Bastion seeing this leans down in his face and roars in Abyssal, “I may not be able to kill your master. But I am going to kill you…”

The demon headbutts Bastion in response, hitting him in the face with the adamantine horns and spikes on his helmet. And instinctively Laurel lets a healing spell fly.

The fingers of Bastion’s right hand knit back together -- not healing straight, but healing strong. With these grotesque but functional fingers he reaches up and grabs the balor’s helmet. Holding him against the wall, he raises his left fist, quickly casting a spell to harden his skin to steel. He punches him four times in sharp succession, right in the front of the helmet. His helmet dents in grotesquely -- adamantine doesn’t break easily, but it is malleable with enough force at this blazing-hot temperature, and Bastion’s fists are serving as fine hammers. Laurel cringes inwardly at the sound. Underneath the resounding clang of the adamantine, there's a messy, wet squelch with each blow. She's pretty sure that if a normal head were in there, it would be crushed to useless pulp at this point.

Bastion then bends the horn in his other hand back until the point is facing uselessly to the rear, and lets the balor slide to the floor in a scraping, shuddering heap. Bastion takes a step back, before laying into the demon again. He swings with both fists, hitting the exhausted balor six times in the head, crushing his glowing helmet like a tin can, smashing a hole in the marble wall behind him, and forcing his head through with the force of the blows. The balor’s neck extends and twists grotesquely, and Laurel flinches as it cracks.

Laurel almost asks if it's dead, but before she can consider the state of the creature, Bastion's movement draws her eye. With one long step he strides around the dais to pick up the thing’s strange drill. He triggers the heating mechanism, and it begins to glow a brilliant bluish white, like a tiny sun. Somehow the balor hears this and twitches feebly, trying to pull its head out of the wall.

Laurel feels something coiled tightly in her gut begin to come loose as she watches this with unbridled and practically uncivilized glee. She feels proud and powerful. And for a moment -- for the briefest of seconds she thinks, "If only I could take you to Khin-Oin..." 

Bastion seems to read her mind. He gives her a smirk so wicked and sharp it could cut glass and then pounces on the balor again, whirring drill first. There's a grinding sound again as the bit strikes the plating, the glowing diamond spinning too fast to see. And then it disappears into the balor's armor with a hideous, saturated squelch. Bastion carves a hole clean through the center of his chest plate and into whatever passes for flesh behind it. Black ichor spills out, and the balor lets out one more pitiful, gurgling shriek before it slumps against the wall, clearly dead, ichor pouring out of the ruined mess of its mouth.

Bastion pitches the drill to the ground and turns back to Laurel, hands and face streaked with the creature's filth. The preternatural stillness he always wore before settles over him once again, despite the fact that his chest is still heaving from exertion.

“As you have commanded, Laurel Weaver-Of-Tales." he intones with a formality that's entwined with a certain smugness. Then he looks down his sharp nose at the ruined remains of the balor. "I … think I have broken one of your threads.”

Laurel shakes her head to clear it. "My… my threads?"

Bastion shoves the creature over with his foot to clatter to the ground in a useless heap. "I like to think that, when you’re a petitioner, you’ll tell this story, too. But one of the threads -- a minor, thin one, but a black one, was cut short in the middle of the weaving…" 

Laurel nods a little absently. "All things must be as they must." she replies. "Come. We need to get you back to Parnaith's room. Before… before anything else happens." The adrenaline is beginning to fade, she realizes. And suddenly she's not feeling so well.

As the two of them leave the torture chamber, with Bastion in the lead, the fading radiance of his emerald skin lighting their way, Laurel feels compelled to look back. In the dimming light of the cooling drill bit, she can see slick black tendrils emerge from the wall and pull the corpse of the balor back into it. It's as if the creature is being absorbed into the stonework which is covered in the mossy growths of tiny-tentacled corruption. And Laurel is gripped with a sudden understanding.

That thing was the Book's creature, and it was reclaiming it. She will face it again. And she's not sure if she's exhilarated or terrified. Mostly she's confused at the strength of the impression, given that she's probably on her last leg. Perhaps she should find a way to tell her friends… They will be back here for certain, even if she will not. 

As the two of them hurry down the winding halls, the growths of corruption begin to thicken. When they finally reach the end of the corridor, the ceiling, walls, and floor all look like they are covered in some sort of waving, grasping seaweed. And the sight of it makes Laurel queasy. Well… queasier than she already was from swallowing who knew how much blood. 

But there they are at last… outside the entrance to Parnaith’s room which, oddly, isn’t a door. It’s a gossamer curtain, thin and translucent. Within, Laurel sees a warm glow, suffusing the room so as not to leave a shadow in sight, but at the same time not exceptionally bright. Beyond the curtain she can see the faint outline of overly plush furnishings and appointments. But no protective enchantments. Nothing obvious anyway. No barriers or runic inscriptions. And, yet -- somehow it seems that nothing is growing on the curtain or beyond it. 

Is this what kept the fiends at bay? What they had to trick Bastion into leaving? 

Laurel stops just an arm's length from the curtain peering in with squinted eyes. "I had visions of this place… Just brief glimpses when I would dream about Parnaith. I always wanted to see it."

Bastion parts the sheer fabric with a single finger, causing the light within to pour out into the hallway. Laurel watches with rapt attention as the the corruption recoils from where it fell. "She invited me in, long ago." Bastion says softly, poking his head inside to look around before looking back to Laurel. "I am sure she would welcome you in, too."

Laurel takes a deep breath, and passes the curtain behind him, slitting her eyes against the brightness, at least at first. The air within feels lighter somehow, not just because of the illumination but as if the burden inherent to breathing it has somehow been lifted.

Parnaith was a mystic and an altruist, but Laurel had been at least somewhat aware that she was no poverty-seeking ascetic. Her chamber, once a sanctuary itself within the sanctuary of what had once been Mosul Pearl, was both a place of respite for any who needed it, and a small manifestation of her ideals for the world. Until grief drove her to despair, and then in the end to desperate valor in the mouth of that cave, she dreamt of a gradual spiritual awakening among folk of good will across Praemal. Her vision, at least until it was crushed, was to spread admiration for beauty and light, cultivation of ethical thought and compassion, and a universal acknowledgement of shared community and values -- and, in doing so, give a greater gift to Praemal than the mere sealing-up of evil that Danar envisioned. He was a crusader, but she was a creator.

Laurel knows all of this, of course, from the bits and scraps of Parnaith’s life she had gathered in her travels through the Banewarrens. But, casting her gaze around the room, Laurel realizes that Parnaith’s devotion to her aesthetic of softness and light was a far more tangible thing than she thought. Even after thousands of years untouched, the soft glow of continual-flame torches made of multicolored stones wrapped in translucent cloth still suffuses the room, with their light cleverly designed to diffuse around the white marble of the ceiling, rather than into anyone’s eyes directly. No two spots are quite the same color -- the room is draped in a faint and ever shifting rainbow. A series of cushions veiled in soft linens lies scattered around the room -- with no clear distinction drawn between those intended for sleep, for wakeful rest, and for meditation or conversation. All are different shapes, each designed to bring comfort to some size and shape of creature, in some posture or other. A series of silver tubes set inside mother-of-pearl rings hangs from the ceiling -- chimes, probably, though there's no breeze to stir them now. It reminds Laurel in a way of an even softer version of Fall-From-Grace's "brothel” in intent, if not in architecture.

Laurel also knew that Parnaith was, among other things, also a scholar. So around the edges of the room, polished stone desks topped with marble and glass sit in front of firm cushions, awaiting only the presence of a writer or sage to convert their thoughts into fixed form. Marble bookcases line the walls, too, with old cloth-bound volumes leaning on one another as they had for millennia. Looking more closely, Laurel notices to her horror that, as full as the bookcases are of books, their spines bear no titles, and the books are empty of pages! Instead a fine dust collects near the base of the shelves; has something eaten away the contents of Parnaith’s library?

Movement at the edge of Laurel's vision draws her attention away from her beautiful surroundings. She turns and, for a fleeting moment, the last dregs of adrenaline tell her there was something else in the room with them. Something pallid and stained with crimson. Gaunt and sharp eyed. But it was only her reflection in the enormous silvered mirror dominating one corner of the room.

She's taken aback by what she sees, realizing suddenly that she's not actually seen herself in the throes of her own martyrdom. She certainly doesn't look like the martyrs in the books she read back in the dusty stacks of the Temple of Oghma. All clean, pious faces raised to heaven. White clothes and perfect hair rustled by an unseen wind. Every one of them at peace with their fate… beautiful as they transcended their own horrific circumstances.

No… Laurel looks nothing like that. She looks positively ghoulish. Harrowed. Drained. Pouring blood from every orifice as well as from the deep gash at her throat. Her nose. Her ears. Even one of her eyes is stained crimson by blood pouring into her eyeball from within. No wonder her vision is fuzzy. There's hardly a patch of visible skin that isn't coated in drying blood, but everywhere that isn't is mottled purple. Internal injuries as well as those without… It's a chilling sight as she slowly realizes what she's truly done to herself. 

And she looks especially out of place in Parnaith's room, where everything is soft and bright and inviting. She had always wanted to stand in this place. But not like this.

Plus she's getting blood on the snow white carpet.

That will never come out, she thinks. And as she swoons a bit at the sight, she's not sure if she's talking about the stain on the carpet or the stain on herself. How must she have looked, blood fountaining out of her in great gouts as she grinned and commanded violence? How must she have looked to Bastion?

But as for Bastion himself? 

Bastion looks absolutely resplendent in the scintillating light. Some of the vibrant glory has faded as his battle magic has worn off, but he's still breathtakingly beautiful. The green sheen of his skin where it peeks out of the dark adamantine plates is fading, leaving behind a soft lavender. And his eyes glow with an otherworldly light. He truly looks like a creature connected to the divine. Because, right now… he is.

Her last gift to him. And even as she looks at herself in the mirror again, watching the blood ooze slowly down her pallid face, she realizes it was worth it. To hear him laugh. To give him hope. To see him fight for his own salvation. He was worth all of this. 

"Bastion, I need to ask something of you. It's very… it's very important." she says, some of the words coming out as a nearly unintelligible gurgle. She's still bleeding somewhere inside her skull, she realizes. Everything tastes like copper pieces.

"Yes, Laurel?" he says, regarding her as if nothing were wrong with her appearance. As if she didn't look half dead.

"I…" She swirls the words around in her mouth before she speaks them, like a tonic she's on the fence about swallowing. "I command you to not leave this room until I call for you." she finally manages, unable to make herself look at him. "I'm sorry. I don't want to do this but… but you can't. It's too dangerous. I'm… I'm worried my magic is fading the farther in time I get from you. I don't think I can save you from something like that again." She casts a roving eye at her ruined reflection again almost as if to confer with it about her current physical state. Then she clenches her jaw and forces herself to look Bastion in the eye. "I don't care what it is you hear or see out in the rest of the palace… Until you hear my voice commanding you by your rightful name to come to me, do not leave this room. Do you understand?"

If Bastion is surprised or bothered by this, he doesn't show it. He merely inclines his head. "I will do as you ask." He notes her discomfort, in her fidgety hands and far-flung stare. "I trust you -- " he assures her. "Not like I trusted Danar. I do not pledge my loyalty to you -- but I give you this as a promise. I’ll keep your vigil, here, protecting this place as I have. And then, when I hear you, far in my future… I’ll find my way out."

Laurel nods, mostly to herself. "I'm sorry to do this to you. But here. I won't leave you alone." She starts patting around on the pockets of her clothes, trying in vain to ignore the fact that everywhere she touches is tacky with drying blood. "I didn't actually finish my story about Pluton. I told you one thing that I brought back with me but not the other. Remember the Living Cairns?"

He nods. "Yes… the slowest things in the multiverse, it seems. Except waiting here."

Laurel reaches into her bloodied shirt and pulls out a purplish stone wrapped in silver wire and hanging on a chain. It like all her other effects is smeared with crimson. "Aha! Here. I found this when I scooped up my little bottle of dirt. It's a baby Cairn. It doesn't talk yet… give it a few hundred years or so. But you can talk to it. You can tell it stories… my stories. Your stories… whatever you want. It can keep you company."

Bastion lets the stone and the chain puddle up in his massive palm. It's slightly warm to the touch, and not from being so close to Laurel's skin. "I will keep it and treasure it… and, maybe, I’ll hear it say its first words." He holds it up to the diffuse light, watching the radiance of the room catch in all the little imperfections in the crystal. "I never thought I’d see anything grow again, or even be able to abide that thought. But now … even in this place, there can be new life. Thank you -- for this reminder that, even in hell, there are growing things. I’ll make sure it grows up … big and strong?"

Laurel laughs which turns quickly into a saturated cough. She tastes a fresh wave of blood again and she fights hard not to think about why. "I suppose that would work. They certainly get big anyway… I-"

She suddenly pitches forward and falls to her knees, more blood fountaining out of her mouth, nose, and throat onto the carpet. The battle with the balor and the price she paid for all those fancy spells has finally caught up with her. 

She sniffs hard and swallows, immediately having to fight not to gag. "Yeah… definitely not doing that again." she croaks out.

Something in Bastion shrinks at the sight. Maybe it's pity. Maybe it's something else. But he reaches out his left hand, his fingers still mangled and twisted from being broken on the balor's helmet, and begins to cast a spell. "In time, if I stay in this place, I’ll lose all the power I gained from your aid. Healing, consecration, things other than shadow and flame … are not things I can command without help, now. But, while I still can… The blessings of the High Heavens, such as they penetrate here, go with you, Laurel… you have saved me yet again, and I can only repay you in a poor way… since it looks like that wound will still be fatal. But … maybe this will buy you another century or two?" Something like a smile pulls at the corner of his mouth. 

Laurel takes a deep breath, noting her lungs crackle a little less as they expand, and looks up at him with a half-smile of her own. She feels a little better, but she's still fading. Failing him… She reaches up and tugs on his outstretched hand, pulling him to the floor next to her. "I'll take what I can get. You wouldn't happen to have access to a bathtub would you? Because I want a bath."

Bastion smiles to himself and lets himself be pulled, making his way stiffly as the plates on his legs restrict this kind of movement. He was meant to be a guard, not a nurse.

Laurel reaches up to her neck, smearing the side of her face with blood and then the surface of his shoulder plate before leaning her head against his arm. Exhaustion overwhelms her almost instantly, and the last thing she remembers is the steady sound of the angel's breathing. 

Bastion sits still for a moment, looking down at the half unconscious bard next to him. He frowns, the scene conjuring a memory that he's not sure how to relate to the current moment. He remembers Parnaith doing this… long ago to her husband. Before the Book. Before the Sunslayer. Before everything went quite literally to hell. He remembered her leaning her head on his arm and laughing. Danar had been frustrated by something, but somehow her touch brought peace to his roiling emotions, and he'd given in to a small smile. After a long moment, Bastion leans his head against Laurel's, stroking her bloody hair slowly with his other hand.

“Thank you, Laurel … for helping this poor fallen angel back on his feet." he whispers, unsure if she can still hear him and more unsure still if it matters. "Or, rather … off his feet, since sitting here in this place with you is more holy than standing on Mount Celestia.” 

After what seems like almost an hour, the world around Laurel dissolves into mist, slowly. The haze is patchy and broken as before, with ominous dark shadows amidst the clouds of fog. Even as the now-familiar mists close in, she can still feel gentle pressure on her head, although it gets less well-defined as the distance to that moment in Parnaith’s chamber grows.

And she feels like she's being watched. Not by Bastion's curious and affectionate gaze, but something else.

The edges between the mists and the contours of the shadows gradually grow sharper and more defined, and seem to resolve into … a face? A face resolved out of the darkness that peeked through the mists.

... a woman’s face, made out of darkness.

… with flowing white hair…

… and glittering blue eyes.

The woman is looking down at her, and smiling.

Laurel swallows, though she's not exactly sure how much physical control she actually has anymore. "Hi…?" she half whispers. "Sorry. I'm in the process of dying so it makes me a little less formal."

The woman doesn't respond, but merely smiles. The stars of Praemal are reflected in her eyes for the briefest of moments, and then she slowly fades from view.

"Bastion misses you… for the record." Laurel calls out as she begins to disappear. "Talks about you all the time. I'd say I wish he'd gone with you, but I have a feeling you're not supposed to lie to Powers."

There's no response. But Laurel is pretty sure that Eilistraee heard her, as Powers have a way of doing. 

For now, she's gone again, and Laurel continues to drift through the inky fog until her fading body fails her completely, and she passes into unconsciousness.

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can find me on Tumblr at littlethingwithfeathers and you can find our DM at cactusowl.


End file.
